Okay, so you've bought, installed, connected, configured, and then tuned/optimized your new storage virtualization solution, but somehow there are still latencies with apps (e.g. SQL). You've run the Storage Area Network (SAN) vendor utilities that: did not see any contention on the disks in the RAID group(s). [...]
Overview: As high performing storage solutions based on block protocols (e.g. iSCSI, FC), SANs excel at optimizing block access. SANs work at a storage layer underneath the operating systems file system; usually NTFS when discussing Microsoft Windows®. That dictates that a SAN is unaware of [...]
One of the most significant features in Windows 2008R2 (for Hyper-V) is Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) for virtual disks (vhd). This allows NTFS to behave similar to a clustered file system, addressing many limitations found in Hyper-V storage with the original release (Windows 2008). There are three online [...]
When Windows NT 4.0 was released, Diskeeper 2.0 hit the market. NT 4.0 had limitations about the type of data that could be safely moved online. So, a market-first innovation that Diskeeper brought to market with Diskeeper 3.0 was what we called Boot Time Defragmentation. Boot Time Defragmentation addressed these special [...]
On April 10, 2002, Diskeeper enjoyed 15 seconds of TV game-show fame on the TV show Jeopardy with the answer: "Diskeeper is software to do this, reorganize your computer’s files." The contestant won $2,000 by correctly providing the question, "What is defragment?"
The purpose of this blog post is to provide some data about fragmentation on the Mac, that I've not seen researched/published elsewhere. Mac OSX has a defragmenter in the file system itself. Given Mac is open-source, we looked at the code. During a file open the files [...]
Last week I received an email via the blog that I thought would be good to publish. Graham, a Diskeeper user from the UK asked: "I have been advised that it is wrong to defrag an SSD hard drive. So is it safe to run Diskeeper now that I [...]
ExpressCache is a new, presently shipping, OEM product that we announced at the CES trade show last week. ExpressCache is a software storage performance solution that requires both an HDD and an SSD (smaller affordables drives are all that is needed). In short, ExpressCache effectively combines the two [...]
I recently came across an older article about defragmenting SANs (read it here). It includes interviews with analysts, SAN vendors (some pro-defrag, some against), and an employee from Diskeeper Corporation. I was particulary impressed with the EMC'ers response: "The SAN can't do anything about the fact [...]
"The reports of my DE-mise have been greatly exaggerated." (or something like this) -Mark Twain First off let me state this blog on Drive Extender is entirely based on rumor. While I have significant access to resources at Microsoft, none of the following statements are based [...]