PerfectDisk Blog from Raxco.com| Defrag Software

Start your engines

A new era begins tomorrow, as we release a new family of products that we believe represents the broadest and most comprehensive offering ever by a disk defragmentation provider. With this launch, users can now ensure maximum performance and availability across their Windows environments -- PCs and laptops, servers, VMware workstation and servers, Exchange servers and even Windows Home Server systems -- enterprises, small- and medium-sized businesses, and home consumers.

With this launch, we address the requests and needs of thousands of our users and have enhanced and improved many aspects of the product, and added new products or PerfectDisk components. To be released tomorrow:

• PerfectDisk 2008 Professional
• PerfectDisk 2008 Server
• PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware Workstation
• PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware Server
• PerfectDisk 2008 for Exchange
• PerfectDisk 2008 for Windows Home Server

From the land of Hollywood, we've heard that the new demands of the 21st century demand defragmentation programs run continuously. As I've pointed out here before, that's really a coverup for the lack of being able to completely defragment all files and completely consolidate free space in a single pass. And that's what some of the world's largest companies have told us -- their environments demand the flexibility to schedule when "always-on" defragmenting is not an option. But just to make sure, you can have it your way - whatever that way is -- as we introduce StealthPatrol unattended background disk defragmentation. Combine this with our exclusive AutoPilot Scheduling, with flexible scheduling options according to your specific requirements, and you have the most complete, flexible and automated disk defragmentation software available -- and you maintain complete control.

What's new in the PerfectDisk family:

PerfectDisk 2008 Professional and PerfectDisk 2008 Server

• A brand new user interface to enhance usability and improve the user experience, including ribbons, new wizards, new graphs and more.
• Enhancements to the popular Single Defrag option, including a new Selected Files Defrag capability to defragment selected files rather than the entire drive.
• New StealthPatrol unattended background defragmentation for use when scheduling is not convenient.
• New free space management capabilities including Space Explorer that provides a bird's eye view of your drive, directories, and files.
• New Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) compatibility mode provides enhanced defragmentation of VSS environments.
• Reduced memory footprint for improved performance.
• Support for the exFAT file system for improved flash drive support.
• Vista SP1 (Professional edition) and Windows Server 2008 (Server edition) ready.

PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware Workstation and PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware Server

• A complete automated optimization solution for VMware virtual drives in accordance with VMware recommendations.
• Full defragmentation and free space consolidation of VMware vrtual drives with PerfectDisk's patented SMARTPlacement optimzation scheme to improve virtual machine performance.
• Automated reindexing of VMware internal drive structures for improved performance.
• Automated shrinking and compaction of virtual drives to reclaim space.
• Automated defragmentation, optimzation and free space consolidation of host drives to improve host performance.
• Installation required only on the host system.

PerfectDisk 2008 for Exchange

• New support for Exchange 2007 to provide total automation of data store defragmentation/compaction for reclaiming Exchange disk space and improving Exchange performance.

PerfectDisk 2008 for Windows Home Server

• All the enhancements of the Professional and Server editions now available for users in WHS environments.

Flexibility. Automation. Complete control. Users around the world asked. We listened.

Coming tomorrow.

         

            

                     

PerfectDisk 9 -- when

"I was perfectly happy with Version 8 - I didn't need a thing changed, especially the interface."

Well, you can't please all the people all the time. But we always try our best, and think we're going to please almost everyone with our new release. Or as Donn Edwards, the Great Defrag Shootout sheriff, told us, " well organised and easy to use. Well done!" And that was just one person's comment - the feedback has been extraordinary and humbling - too numerous to list all. Here's a taste:

• "Beyond outstanding."
• "This is sincerely a peerless product."
• "Faster. Better. Prettier."
• "More functionality, faster, and easier to use."
• "Will be running on all my workstations as soon as it's released."
• "Visually the more impressive release to date."
• "Again, Raxco is building the leading defrag tool."
• "Great! And even working on Windows Server 208 RC1."
• "A much improved and faster program with an excellent interface."
• "It makes an already outstanding program even better."
• "Taking well-arranged data storage to new heights."
• "Straightforward defragmentation champion which shouldn't be missing in your utilities collection."
• "Exchange 2007 support - yes!"
• "This is a big - and pleasantly surprising - step for VMware users - great stuff."
• "Innovative."
• "I want it."

Get ready - www.raxco.com.

                  

Beware hocus-pocus (reading and writing edition)

Some might tell you that you can use a performance monitoring tool such as Windows' PerfMon utility to determine that a defrag utility is doing its job. Sounds reasonable. And I would agree that you can get an idea of fragmentation's impact on a disk subsystem (a single disk or RAID/SAN). But that's not enough.

To really get a handle on whether a defrag tool is helping, it's important to look not just at the entire drive and overall statistics for the drive. It's very important to look at all the files on a drive. Because if you have, for example, a thousand files on your drive, and 950 are completely defragmented but the other 50 are a mess, your drive is not in the best possible shape it can be. So you need to look at all files on the drive, and you need to look at write times specifically too. Because if you are writing new files to your drive and your free space is not consolidated, you're going to run into performance problems. And to determine this, you need to use more than PerfMon. You should use a tool like hIOmon, which provides very detailed performance information not only at the device level, but also at the file level, giving you the true story of how much a defragmentation tool is helping.

For a detailed overview of determining the impact of file fragmentation and free space fragmentation on drive performance, check out Greg Hayes' (Raxco Software's 5-time Microsoft MVP) article on this subject.

This is why free space consolidation matters - without it, your drive not only fragments more quickly, but performance suffers when you are writing to the drive.

And running all the time, over and over, time and again, invisibly or in full view, without consolidating free space, won't change that fact. You might think you're going somewhere fast, but you're just spinning your wheels.

            

Hey Microsoft, thanks for your support

We've had fantastic response to PerfectDisk for Windows Home Server since its launch a couple of weeks ago as the first disk defragmenter available for Microsoft's Windows Home Server. Just as we are pleased that many departments within Microsoft use PerfectDisk on their workstations and servers, we have been very pleased with Microsoft's employees embracing the product. They're pleased with everything from the quality to the pricing, and we're happy that Raxco and PerfectDisk were included in Microsoft's Windows Home Server launch event earlier this week - so my thanks to everyone up in Redmond (and other Microsoft offices around the world) for their support.

                

Dig deep into virtualization, your page file and more -- The Frog knows!

Rex Winn of the Code-Frog System Architects tells an interesting story over in The Frog Blog. Having to mirror one of his clients who had just purchased VMware Workstation 6.0 and gearing up on the whole virtualization thing, Rex was puzzled as to why he wasn't seeing any performance gains. In fact, as the virtual machines and host got up and running, performance "tanked." Rex went to work investigating, and focused on page files, which a product he was running indicated was in fine shape. But Rex knew better, and PerfectDisk showed it - the page file was a mess. Rex picked up PerfectDisk to clean up the mess, and his client's performance is now humming along..."the effects were obvious immediately....I had a boost in performance immediately." And, with Raxco Software's special of just $99 for PerfectDisk Server, it was a price he couldn't turn down.

Don't take things (i.e. hype) for granted. Put PerfectDisk to work, and you'll find your Prince Charming for disk defragmentation.

               

Announcing PerfectDisk 8 for Windows Home Server

Today we have released PerfectDisk 8 for Windows Home Server. Just recently, Microsoft announced that Windows Home Server would be launched on October 1st, 2007. We are pleased to make PerfectDisk available for this environment, at an attractive price. PerfectDisk is the first disk defragmenter available for Windows Home Server.

Microsoft categorizes the Windows Home Server features into these 4 topics -- protect, connect, organize and grow. While we can see real small businesses using it, Microsoft's marketing message emphasizes the family and the home (naturally, given its name), stating on the Windows Home Server home page that "Windows Home Server brings it all together for families with multiple PCs. Now it's easy to keep and share documents, photos, videos, and music--all in one central place. Protect, connect, and organize the way you keep and share your family's most important memories." It's a central repository and place to perform and store your backups.

With lots of files changing regularly, fragmentation will be an issue. PerfectDisk for Windows Home Server is easy to install, and requires no attention or management. Just set it up and it runs in the background, using very minimal resources. So for those of you planning to use Windows Home Server, you'll be able to immediately see the benefits of automatic defragmentation with PerfectDisk.

What we like most is being the best, and the awards we've won are a testament to that. But we also like being first, as evidenced by our leadership and "firsts" in Vista support and certification, large drive support, free space consolidation, Microsoft MVP and MCT adoption, Active Directory support, price and value, and more.

Press release.

For those of you who are or will be using Windows Home Server, automate your defrags and then go have fun with Microsoft's new toy.

                        

                                             

 

The $99 Server Defragmenter

One of our missions at Raxco is to always provide value. Superior technology, outstanding technical support and customer service, and a fair price. Whether a user is looking for a desktop or laptop solution, a server solution, or a centralized management solution, our goal is to provide the best product and the best price - and we think we deliver. Free space consolidation, optimization, MFT and all NTFS metadata defragmentation, single-pass.

So I wanted to share with you a really special value proposition. If you're in the market for a defragmenter for a server - or 2 or 5 or 10 or 100, you can now get hold of PerfectDisk Server for just 99 bucks. It may be trite to say "paradigm shift," but this changes things. To take advantage, go here.

                 99

Look who's driving PerfectDisk

A symbol of excellence in the automotive industry.

                                         

A symbol of excellence in disk defragmentation.

          

They know quality and performance when they see it.

                               

Announcing Optimize Now -- a new newsletter for enterprise IT professionals

Around mid-July, Raxco Software will launch a new newsletter for enterprise users -- Optimize Now. This newsletter will focus on performance, productivity and storage management issues for those of you in an enterprise environment.

The goal is to bring you informative and topical information to help you in your jobs - by either providing specific how-to information or a perspective on a particular topic or issue. Information will be provided in a variety of media, including articles, podcasts and more.

So if this sounds like it's for you, I encourage you to sign up below. If not, you can continue to look here for PerfectDisk, Raxco Software and industry news and opinions. 

  Click here to sign up.

Save your job, be a hero -- defrag now!

Partners in IT, a United-Kingdom-based service management company, recently reported, after a study, that business managers in the UK lose 31 working days - more than 10 percent of the year - putting out fires that result from bad management of IT systems. I learned of this from an article in eWeek Careers.

Almost 75 percent of non-IT business managers surveyed said they spent, on average, 12 percent of their time each week dealing with problems caused by their IT systems. Eighty percent said that IT system downtime was a productivity issue, and 90 percent of survey respondents in large companies said downtime was a big issue.

Paul Cash, managing director of Partners in IT, said "globalization of successful businesses coupled with more flexible and mobile work forces have driven innovation within even the largest of companies. Technology has played its part in helping to drive this innovation but, just as any other resource in an organization, technology needs to be maintained and managed - it needs time devoted to it to ensure that the most benefit is gained."

Do fragmentation problems cause all the 31 lost working days? Surely not. But I would bet that a great deal of down time, help desk calls, general frustration and more is the result of fragmentation problems. That's why, despite its lack of visibility in the press, many forward-thinking companies and companies that pay great attention to optimal performance and user productivity, deploy enterprise defragmentation software. They know that without it, there can be decreased end-user productivity, wasted system admin and help desk resources, increased backup times, hanging applications, and in extreme cases, even worse.

I agree with most of what Cash says, although I would say that with a product like PerfectDisk, you can gain a lot with very minimal time devoted.

If you're an IT professional drowning in fire-fighting, free up some of your time with enterprise deframentation. Or be the forward-thinking person and help reduce fire-fighting with defragmentation so you and your organization can spend more time on strategic initiatives.

It's a good move for your company -- and for you.