Finding Latencies in your VM/SAN Infrastructure
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). noted that the average I/O [...]
Best Practices for Storage Area Network (SAN) Defragmentation
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 “file” fragmentation and unable to [...]
Best Practices for CSV defrag in Hyper-V (Windows Server 2008R2)
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 modes/states for CSV: Direct Access: [...]
How NTFS Reads a File
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 data types during the computer [...]
Additional benefits from our products
As the CTO, one of the biggest joys I get is hearing back from customers on the benefits that our products have provided them. I also find it very interesting how users find other benefits that we had not intentionally planned for the product. For example, one IT Manager would [...]
IBM’s Watson would get this one right too…
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?"
Do you need to defragment a Mac?
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 get defragmented if the following [...]
An Open Letter to Global 1000 CIOs
Dear CIO, One of the most positive things to come out of the recession is a deeper appreciation of how much an efficient IT impacts corporate competiveness and profitability. And no wonder: envisioning and acting upon business opportunities requires having a powerful and flexible data center to work with. In [...]
Is it wrong/unsafe to defrag an SSD?
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 have a 128Gb ssd in [...]
Flash Cache Technology: ExpressCache
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 drives, greatly increasing performance (typically [...]
Do you need to defragment your SAN?
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 that Windows sees the file [...]
not DEad yet?
"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 on info from any person(s) [...]
Inside SSDs 101
We have numerous partners and alliances in the Solid State drive (SSD) space that we interact with regularly. Conversations in related meetings with those allies continues to revolve around the same issue, overcoming performance bottle necks at the storage level. In attacking this problem to get higher performance for things [...]
New Diskeeper 2010 update (14.0.913)
There's a new build of Diskeeper 2010 available that includes the following fixes: Performance improvements in InvisiTasking related to 8+ core systems and eliminating unnecessary context switching. Fixed I-FAAST measurement that would fail on some busy systems and consequently keep getting rescheduled. Improved defragmentation process to avoid keeping extremely fragmented [...]
Defragmenting IT Healthcare
[et_pb_section fb_built="1" admin_label="section" _builder_version="3.22.3"][et_pb_row admin_label="row" _builder_version="3.22.3" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.0.47"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text" _builder_version="3.22.7" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"]Joe Marion is founder and Principal of Healthcare Integration Strategies, specializing in the integration of imaging technologies with the overall healthcare IT landscape. His blog (at Healthcare Informatics) covers challenges and opportunities specifically relevant to optimizing [...]