PerfectDisk Blog from Raxco.com| Defrag Software

Tidbits - Part 2

A couple more items that caught my eye this week:

• The number of floor traders on the NYSE has dropped by a quarter in the last year. The drop is being driven by powerhouse brokerage firms such as Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse, as they look to shave milliseconds off transactions that can result in an extra $100 million a year to a brokerage firm - wow! Floor traders are moving out, being replaced by human traders that are working on these super fast systems. By the way, many of these large brokerage firms also use PerfectDisk for their defragmentation needs. Business At Light Speed is Information Week's cover story this week.
• No surprise here, but Information Week has a new survey out that says 30% of businesses have no plans to upgrade to Vista - not ever. We'll wait for Microsoft's response to this latest shot. What Microsoft really needs is for some day for some survey with real street cred to come out with better news. Haven't seen it yet. Of course, some day XP support will go away, and then maybe there will be an attitude change.

Until next week...

Tidbits - Part 1

A few items that have caught my attention over the last few days:

• Computerworld had an interesting article on how virtualization is cutting storage costs for some large firms. As storage demands continue to grow seemingly unabated and the technology matures, real companies are realizing real technology and management cost savings. For example, Banc of America Securities has cut its storage administration costs by 95%. So, I'd say despite the hype that can be bothersome to people, virtualization is real and here to stay.
• As reported by eWeek and just about everyone else, Microsoft has released its first public beta of Longhorn and is on track to release to manufacturing late this year. Time will tell whether current dates hold up, but thousands of testers are working with the Beta product now. Like Vista, at some point, its day will come.

And finally, as a reminder - Raxco Software will be making an exciting announcement on May 8th.

There are a couple more -- I'll share those later.

More from Japan

Raxco Software's president and CEO, Bob Nolan, is in Tokyo, Japan this week for a launch event of PerfectDisk 8 and PerfectDisk 8 for Exchange for enterprise users. It's also been announced that PerfectDisk is now offered on Epson's Note PCs in Japan as a buy-to-order option. This includes several models, such as the Endeavor NJ 2050.

Also, here at corporate headquarters in the United States, we'll be announcing something big on May 8th.

Vista -- some business customers now for Microsoft

From what we read, and certainly from what we've seen from our vantage point, adoption of Vista by the corporate world is going to be slow. There just aren't enough compelling reasons for a business or federal agency to jump up and do it. But I think even if there were, the adoption rate would beslow, or perceived as slow. The larger the organization, the more complex an upgrade is - OS builds, testing, integration with applications, and more. It just takes a long time. Combine that normally arduous task with the lack of "must-have" capabilities - even if security is better - and you have an adoption rate that is going to take place over years.

Still, wherever there is some action, or potential action, we're going to hear about it. Steve Ballmer last week told a group in Redmond that Citigroup is going to upgrade as many as 500,000 PCs to Vista in the next year. He also stated that, contrary to many reports, there are not a lot of federal agencies that have banned the move to Vista. Maybe it depends on what your definition of a lot is...

Whatever the overall rate is, we know lots of you are running Vista now, or planning to soon. So that's why we have a certified defragger for your needs...whenever you make the move.

Rich Levin's PC Talk Radio

Rich Levin is the host of PC Talk Radio, a nationally syndicated tech talk show that is also streamed over the net and can be listened to by visiting his web site here. Rich has been at this for years, and before running this show and a bunch of other neat stuff he does now, he was the senior editor of application development for Information Week, information technology reporter for CBS Radio, computer book author, computer program author and probably a few other things I don't know about.

A couple of weeks ago, he had me on this show to talk about defragmentation in Vista and XP. You can hear the interview on Rich's site here. Rich knows his stuff, so he kept me on my toes.

Dell brings back XP!

Greg Hayes, our resident Microsoft MVP, just brought me the news that Dell is going to let home PC buyers choose between XP and Vista on certain new machines. Over 10,000 people quickly voted on a plea to "Don't eliminate XP just yet."                                                                      

No worries on defragmentation. PerfectDisk has you covered -- XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 -- and still the only defragger certified for Vista.

Bring us your tired, your poor, your most messy drives

                                    

What does a Fortune 200, $15 billion retail company do when its IT department is confronted with, among other challenges, this potentially crippling problem on a 600 GB critical server:

Drive 1

• Almost 80,000 fragmented files in over 5 million fragments
• One file in about 80,000 pieces
• Less than 5GB of free space
• The largest piece of free space of just 562MB

Drive 2

• Over 61,000 fragmented files in over 3.5 million fragments
• One file in almost 32,000 fragments
• 92GB of free space
• The largest free space is just 118MB

                                  

It really had no choice. It used PerfectDisk to defragment its drives. Low total free space, ridiculously small bits of free space, and a huge amount of fragments. No other tool can handle this type of scenario.

If a defragmenter can't handle your worst situation, is it really worth it, despite its hype?

                           

Virtualization -- Please, no bodily harm!

Okay, so I'm all set to write a little about virtualization, and I read an article in Network Computing that states one in four respondents to a survey about the most despised tech buzzwords indicated they would threaten bodily harm to the next salesperson who mentioned it. I'm not a salesperson, but it made me stop and reconsider! Alas, I reconsidered again, and here goes...

Sherri Cassel of our Technical Support group has put together an article for the upcoming edition of RaxcoConnections, our quarterly newsletter. The following is just a piece of the article.

Defragmenting is just one way to ensure your virtual environments operate at optimal performance. But, it's as important as other methods such as not overloading the host machine, allocating the appropriate amount of memory, and storing the virtual machine files on a disk separate from the OS.

In virtual environments, not only do you need to be concerned about the fragmentation on each of your virtual machines (VMs), but you also need to be concerned about fragmentation on the host machine. A fragmented drive on the host machine will cause performance issues on the VMs. Each virtual machine is stored as a file on a host machine, and this file can become fragmented, leading to excesive I/O and decreased performance for your virtual sessions.

If your virtual environment is configured with dynamically expanding or variable size disks, then defragmenting is especially important. As data is written to the virtual drive, the size of the virtual machine file on the host machine grows as needed. And with the file size growing, the file will become increasingly fragmented, further hampering performance.

As always with fragmentation, free space is critical. Fragmented free space may increase the level of fragmentation of the virtual machine file as it grows if there is not a large enough piece of free space in which the file will fit. Yet another area where PerfectDisk's Space Restoration Technology with single-pass free space consolidation is critical. If free space is not consolidated, your virtual environment will not reap all the benefits you're looking for.

Fragmentation happens. And it happens in a virtual environment. And, it happens the same way in a virtual environment as it happens on physical machines. It's equally important to defragment each of your virtual machines as well as the virtual machine file on the host machine in order to achieve optimal performance.

I'm not going to tell you to set up a virtual environment - I don't want bodily harm. But if you're going that route, go smartly. Defragment your entire drive and consolidate all your free space - in a single pass.

New Webinar -- PerfectDisk Overview

Last week we had our second Webinar. This one was an overview of the PerfectDisk client, and we had a big audience of people from all over the world tuning in. Our first webinar, on the Command Center, was given the previous month. You can see a recording of both, as well as questions and answers from the webinar, here.

RAID or mirror sets -- important to defrag

We are sometimes asked whether or not PerfectDisk defragments RAID or mirror sets. The answer is yes. Because the underlying disk technology is hidden from PerfectDisk by Windows, the only thing that matters to PerfectDisk is that the file system is either FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS. PerfectDisk makes sure that files are logically contiguous, regardless of what type of disk technology is being used.

And, we're often "told" that RAID volumes or SANs do not need to be defragmented. On these instances, we need to respectfully disagree and point out that PerfectDisk can provide great benefit to RAID and SAN environments. And at the core is the same reason as above - it all goes back to the fact that they are using a Windows file system. For more detail, read our white paper on disk defragmentation in RAID and SAN environments.

For NTFS or FAT, defragmentation is never a bad idea.