"How To Reduce the Cost of Business Computers"

Complete Transcript of
Marcus Galindo – Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
March 08 2008

Alan:  When a consumer looks at reasons why their computer systems are running slower than they should, it’s all about time and performance – their time wasted and the performance of the machine. But when a business or corporation looks at why computers are running slow, they are looking at the cost factor. Our guest today is Marcus Galindo, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Marcus.

Marcus:  Thank you, Alan. Thanks for having me.

Alan:  When a business or corporation looks at why their computer systems are running slow, it’s dollars. It’s dollars wasted because computers are supposed to be running at a certain speed and they count on those computers to be running at a certain speed. They lose dollars for every time that it is slower than it is supposed to be, don’t they?

Marcus:  They do. There’s a myriad of different ways that lose money through computers being slow. Even if you look at the fact that sales people can be on the phone with somebody and a slow computer getting that quote in not enough time, that can cost them a sale.

Alan:  When you are looking at this problem from a business standpoint, especially a corporation’s standpoint, you are not just looking at the cost of when one computer slows down – you’re looking at a major "time" factor. This could be as small as maybe 5 to 10 computers in a small business or up to 1,000 computers in a corporation. You’re looking at this problem for one computer for every user in the business.

Let’s just look at what is the most likely cause of this problem.

Marcus:  Well, the major problem in computers slowing down is actually the physical part of the computer, which is the hard drive. Everything else has become fully electronic and therefore the speeds on your memory, your processors are all super-fast, but the hard drive is the only thing that is still doing physical work. There’s an actual read head that has to go across the disk in order to get information. That’s a physical movement, which takes time - much longer than any type of processor or memory process.

Alan:  It’s the only mechanical device that we have in our computer systems, other than our DVD or CD, it’s the hard drive. This hard drive is being accessed all the time. On a workstation, we can basically control when a user is going to be accessing what program, because they’re the ones that decide to run that program.

But, when you’re looking at a "server standpoint," it’s like all bets are off, because now you have multiple users with multiple computers, running multiple applications and they’re all hitting this hard drive at the same time. And now the problem gets really compounded!

Marcus:  You do, because once you have all those people accessing the same files at the same time, what happens is that those files can grow contiguously or they can not grow contiguously and actually become "fragmented" across the disk.

What happens then is that there are multiple places that the hard drive has to go to in order to read that same file. There are so many people accessing a server in a standard company. You know, you’re talking about hundreds of users that are accessing sometimes the same drive. And so, that drive is constantly working to try and meet all those different requests.

Alan:  Well, let’s look at it from the hard drive’s standpoint; from a workstation, just one user is working with an application. They may have a database open and as they are using the database, it’s going to be writing a record and then maybe writing another record and maybe writing another record. It’s a good possibility that the records are going to be written contiguously or one right after the other.

But on a server, you can get multiple people having the same database open and they could have other spreadsheets open, and they could have maybe a word processor open – who knows what else? There is no method or madness as to how it’s going to be stored on a server.

Marcus:  Sometimes, because there is so much data on the server, it does become a problem – because you can have the same file being accessed by multiple people or you may have it being stored in multiple places and being saved over the top of itself. It may be growing in size or even shrinking in size, depending on what’s being done. And that can cause problems with storing it contiguously on a drive, because that same space that’s been allocated before is not the same space that’s going to be needed later.

Alan:  On a workstation, more than likely if you’ve got plenty of disk space, there’s a good chance things are going to be contiguous. But, on a server, the odds are really against any of the files being contiguous and that’s where you really need to have something that’s running automatically, in the background that’s taking care of the server.

Marcus:  Fragmentation can be a big problem in servers, and you need a solution that’s going to be able to handle that in realtime and keep those files contiguous so that you can keep optimum speeds throughout a network.

Alan:  The cost of a computer slowing down is very important to a business. That’s not the only thing they look at. As you pointed out, hard drives are physical devices that the more they are used the more likely they are to fail. Hard drives cost money to replace, so the less that they have to be accessed, the more money a company can save.

Marcus:  That’s correct. Hard drives are the number one things that fail in computers and therefore, maintaining a hard drive in it’s optimum state is really important to extend the life of the hard drive. When you’re talking about multi-terabyte systems, especially in servers, they can be very costly to companies to replace.

Alan:  And each time that we access the hard drive, we’re literally making a head move across a platter, and it’s not that the hard drives are bad, the hard drives are very high performance, very fast-running pieces of equipment. The problem is that they are very high performance, very fast-running moving physical pieces of equipment and the more they move, the more they are going to wear out, sooner.

By cutting down the amount of accesses that each user has when they go to the server, we’re going to be saving a lot of money for this corporation, aren’t we?

Marcus:  These hard drives standard today are running at over 7,200 revolutions per minute. There’s a lot of processes going on and because of that speed, because it’s such a high-precision device, it’s important to keep it in the best state possible.

Alan:  Well, nowadays, where stored data is so vital for a company’s existence, more companies are now turning to a technology called, "RAID," where you can have either a "mirrored" system, where you have two hard drives that are storing the same data at the same time, or possibly what they call "striped" data, where you can have multiple hard drives storing a part of each data, therefore if one hard drive goes down, you still have the redundancy factor of being able to retrieve all of your data.

And now you’re really compounding the problem, because now you have multiple hard drives, storing the same amount data and it’s absolutely critical that they be maintained at their optimum performance, isn’t it?

Marcus:  You have RAID ARRAY system set up, you have multiple points of data being stored across multiple drives and because of that, the issue of fragmentation actually becomes worse because now you’re talking about not only moving across one drive, but across several drives. Because once you start looking at writing data across multiple drives, you’re obviously seeing increased traffic.

With multiples of users, of course, that traffic is then compounded. So now you have multiple hard drives being written to multiple times and you’re increasing the amount of wear and tear on the drives, themselves.

Alan:  And this is where Diskeeper really shines, because Diskeeper runs automatically, runs in the background, we don’t even have to schedule it anymore, do we?

Marcus:  Diskeeper is now designed so that it runs automatically in the background, but only using idle resources, so if there’s important processes that are going on and taking up all of the resource, it backs off and waits until a better time to do its’ job.

Alan:  So, in a sense, it really acts like a traffic cop, making sure that vital processes are always being run at the fastest possible speed and then when it senses that the system is idle, only then does it do its defragmentation.

Marcus:  Exactly. What we do is we actually monitor a myriad of different factors, including memory, processor, and hard drive input and output in order to determine the best possible time to do what we need to do.

Alan:  Talking about picking the right time to do file defragmentation, there was a time that we could do that off-hours. But nowadays, everything is 24 hours – 7 days a week; there is no down time! There is no time that we can schedule for defragmentation. It has to be done in real-time, now, doesn’t it?

Marcus:  Exactly. We have all kinds of people working today from home. We have people working across the globe, and so there really are no hours in the day when systems are not being used. Standard defragmentation, setting on a schedule or something like that, is actually a very resource-intensive process.

So, you don’t want that running when you have got people who are trying to work on a big project or doing something of that sort at night or over the weekend. It’s really become in today’s economy, not something that’s an option. That’s why it’s important to have an automatic solution that’s going to take care of it in realtime, without affecting any foreground processes.

Alan:  Also, when you’re talking about scheduling, in order to schedule a workstation to be defragged, the user has to leave his workstation on overnight. And that means 1) The hard drive’s going to be running all night long and 2) That means their computer’s going to have to be running all night long – and both of those cost corporations money.

Now, with the new Diskeeper Product, doing scheduling on workstations is just really a thing of the past!

Marcus:  There was recently a survey done that showed that a mid-sized company wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs, just from leaving computers on overnight. So, now a lot of administrators, a lot of IT professionals are looking for ways to do the things that they need to do online, during the day, while the computers are working, without having to leave those machines on overnight, wasting all that money.

Alan:  Before InvisiTasking, it used to be every time that a defragger would kick in, the user would see it, know about it, and complain about it. Well, now it runs in the background and the user doesn’t even know that it’s running.

Marcus:  Anybody who has worked in IT knows that any little slow-down in a user’s computer is going to cause a phone call to Help Desk or at least some type of complaint. Every administrator is looking for ways to do these processes, to do the things that they need to do, without affecting a user’s performance.

Alan:  We talked about hard drives – do you have some kind of statistics that show what companies that are using Diskeeper for defragmentation are saving?

Marcus:  Companies, by using defragmentation solution and particularly one that‘s automatic, are able to extend the lives of their hard drives, sometimes 2 to 3 times, depending on how much they use their systems, of course. It’s all very important in terms of long-term cost savings, not only because of the cost of hard drives, but if you look at the cost of the IT staff it takes to replace those hard drives, to do analysis on those drives, or even to try to repair them – it’s a very high-cost situation for companies.

Alan:  And that’s the whole secret – it’s the cost. It’s the cost alone of replacing the hard drives could pay for having defragmentation automatic on every computer in the corporation, can’t it?

Marcus:  Oh, certainly, especially in the RAID ARRAY systems that you were talking about, where you’re talking about not only the cost of the hard drives, but also the additional cost of the software it takes to implement a good solution. And again – as I talked about before, the IT staff it takes to do the installations, even the down-time for the server that it’s costing your company.

Alan:  Well, what about all these different workstations? We talked about how important it is to have a defragmentation solution, but you don’t want to have to go from workstation to workstation to install the software. Can we just push it down to the different workstations?

Marcus:  Administrators are able to install this across an entire network, by using our Administrator Version, which allows them to push-install out to the entire network. That, of course, means even more cost-savings, by not having them go from machine to machine to machine, in order to install it.

Alan:  What is the cost of getting Diskeeper put on all your machines?

Marcus:  It all depends on your needs, but our Standard Server Edition goes for $300, but we have packages available for companies who want to put together large systems sets and of course, we have price breaks for multiple buys, all those types of things.

Alan:  If somebody would like to really try out Diskeeper Software on one of their servers, do you have a Trialware, available on your Website? And is this a full-featured Trialware or is it stripped down in any manner?

Marcus:  We offer a full, 30-day trial and it’s not limited in any way. It’s 30 days and they can really see how Diskeeper is going to solve their fragmentation problem, automatically, in the background.

Alan:  If somebody would like to find out more information about Diskeeper, about defragging and also view some of the statistics that you have on your Website, where would they go?

Marcus:  They can check out our Website, which is www.diskeeper.com and on there we have our Trialware available, as well as other tools for companies looking to see the impact of fragmentation.

Alan:  Marcus, as always, it’s been our pleasure to have you on Let’s Talk Computers, talking about how corporations can save a lot of money and we hope to have you back on the air again, talking about your other exciting Products.

Marcus:  Thank you for having me, Alan.