PerfectDisk Blog from Raxco.com| Defrag Software

PerfectDisk ROI in a Server Environment

We have a new white paper out entitled PerfectDisk ROI in a Server Environment. The paper summarizes some of the ways an organization can proactively save time and money with PerfectDisk, including:

• Better end user productivity
• Shorter backup times
• Improved server availability
• Maximized hardware investments
• Improved performance in virtual environments
• Reduced system administration time
• Life cycle extension.

You can see the entire white paper in the PerfectDisk Press Room under Product Information - White Papers.

            

In these times, ROI is more important than ever.

Crikey! PerfectDisk in action at Foster's

                                

We have a new short video case study of PerfectDisk in use at Foster's, the wine and beer people. It's a pretty cool video to watch, and is located in the PerfectDisk Press Room on our web site and here at YouTube.

   

Foster's Case Study

                      

Twitter tweets for PerfectDisk

Add Twitter as another way that we are trying to stay connected to our users. This blog, the PerfectDisk Pro Users Community, our Keep Your PC Healthy and Optimize Now newsletters, the PerfectDisk group on and Facebook are all ways we're trying to keep in touch with you. 

I'm new to Twitter, but see it as another way to let you know what's going on here at Raxco, and for you to talk to me. And with PerfectDisk 2009 on the horizon, it just may be a way for you to keep in the loop even more.

I'm PerfectDisk on Twitter. If you use it, let's talk.

                      

55,000 people have spoken, so there will be a Part II

With 55,000 views of The Adventures of PerfectDisk on YouTube, it apparently made people laugh, smile, cry...or something. So there will be another - here.

        

Impact of free space consolidation on Windows file system performance

Tomorrow the Balder Technology Group is publishing a new white paper entitled Impact of Free Space Consolidation On Windows File System Performance. The president and CEO of Balder Group is David Goebel. Goebel was part of Microsoft's 4-person Windows NT file system team in the early '90s that architected, designed and implemented NTFS. Goebel and his company continue to do file system and kernel work for Microsoft, including the design of the new exFAT.sys file system released in Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. As Goebel says, he "gave the second half of his twenties developing and debugging Windows NT." Suffice it to say, there are not many more people in the world, within Microsoft or out, who know how the NTFS file system works more than Goebel.

             

The paper gets into the importance of free space consolidation. As any observer of PerfectDisk knows, we have been the leaders in this area for a long time, with others now starting to realize its importance, and giving it more lip service. For example, without free space consolidation, write performance improvements can be lost. While the paper addresses several key points, one in particular is especially interesting:

"PerfectDisk 2008's emphasis on free space consolidation provides performance improvements beyond those of Diskeeper(R) 2008 and the built-in defragmenter. Indeed, the largest chunk of contiguous free space ended up being smaller after Diskeeper finished defragging."

 

This contiguous free space issue is also important for the new solid state storage devices (SSD) coming out. I'll be getting into this more later, but a key point is that without free space consolidation on SSDs, the benefit is lost. Just like on the drives you're using today.

In this case, bigger IS better. And smarter, and faster.

                     

What's cookin' in the lab -- is that PerfectDisk 2009?

             

Just opened up my Inbox a few minutes ago to a fresh copy of a pre-Alpha version of PerfectDisk 2009 from the PerfectDisk lab. Fired it up to take my first look and I can say this -- the engineers are on their way to pushing the envelope again. Now before you get too excited - or anxious or impatient...:) - I need to tell you it's still a few months away. But it's nice to get that first look out of the lab. And I just did a defrag with it - speedy...and a few other surprises.

It's on its way.

                             

Business Week -- End Runs Around Vista

                             

A recent Business Week article discusses HP and others trying to capitalize on Vista's weaknesses. It's a story we can relate to! 

          

End Runs Around Vista gets into Microsoft's partners that sell or support Vista trying to address Vista problems. It says HP has "quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista...employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system, say three sources close to the company."

This is a bit like our story - a gold partner of Microsoft's replacing something in Vista. But ours is no skunk work or end run really, as we've been going straight at whatever built-in defragmenter Microsoft has thrown at the market -- NT, XP, Vista, etc. 

Check out the story here.

              

PerfectDisk 2008 Build 64

PerfectDisk 2008 Build 64 is now available. Updates include:

• New feature -- Support for per-user quotas set with File Server Resource Manager
• Bug fixes and enhancements to the defragmentation driver 
• Fixed bug where system tray icon could show that PerfectDisk was idle while defragmenting
• Fixed potential vulnerability of calling CreateProcess() or ShellExecute funcrions without using quoted paths
• Fixed defragmentation of Virtual Machine host files not working with all options unchecked.

You can "Check For Updates" under the Product Resources tab in PerfectDisk, or wait for Autoupdate.

       

It's virtually September 2008, really

If 2008 is really the year of virtualization (just Google"the year of virtualization"), then September 2008 is the month of virtualization. There's tomorrow's Hyper-V launch event from Microsoft, and next week's VMworld from VMware. And the pace of articles in publications like Computerworld, Redmond Magazine, Information Week and more seems to have moved from red hot to white hot.

      

As people dig into Hyper-V now, we can now draw better comparisons between it and VMware's offerings. Without question, Hyper-V is going to be a formidable competitor to VMware. But I see it as not yet stacking up to VMware ESX in terms of enterprise support. ESX has better OS support and is better at high availability and disaster recovery. But Microsoft is going to be gaining ground in these areas as well. And right now, Hyper-V is easier and more straightforward for server consolidation and easy deployment, so is going to appeal to smaller organizations.

                    

We see big moves in virtualization for Microsoft, VMware and many others. And that's why we're ready to defrag now with PerfectDisk 2008 Server and PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware (for non-ESX shops). Infoworld's David Marshall, writing in his Virtualization Report, says that "as part of its battle with VMware, Microsoft's virtualization ecosystem continues to grow with key partnerships such as with hardware vendors like AMD, Intel, Dell, HP, and IBM. And expect to see more announcements coming out around support of Microsoft's virtualization solutions such as the ones coming out from Acronis, Certeon, Raxco, and Surgient."  

                

It's really a virtual world now.

PerfectDisk group is now on Facebook

                          

We know our user community and the Windows community at large has the opportunity to "talk" to each other and to the world whenever and wherever they want these days, which I think is great. Pick a forum, user group, blog, and let your thoughts be known, research information, praise, vent, etc. It's how I do a lot of my shopping for anything I might be in the market for - I go online and see what others are saying.

         

In this vein, we've tried to expand opportunities for people to talk about PerfectDisk - share ideas, questions, and comments to each other, to PerfectDisk development, product management, technical support, customer service and to myself and other senior management. There's this blog and the PerfectDisk Pro User Community, which adds new users regularly.

And now, for you Facebook users, we've added a PerfectDisk group on Facebook. When you're in Facebook, search for PerfectDisk.

And join...