VMware Advises on Defrag
VMware: Defrag or Not? Dave Lewis sent in a question, “There is such a quandary about disk fragmentation in the VMware environment. One says defrag and another says never. Who's right? This has been a hard subject to track and define.” I’m going to debunk “defragging” in a minute, but [...]
Top 5 Questions from V-locity and Diskeeper Customers
After having chatted with 50+ customers the last three months, I’ve heard the same five questions enough times to turn it into a blog entry, and a lot of it has to do with flash: 1. Do Condusiv products still “defrag” like in the old days of Diskeeper? No. Although [...]
V-locity I/O Reduction Software Put to the Test on 3500 VMs
As much as we commonly mention the expected performance gains from V-locity® I/O reduction software is 50-300% faster application performance, that 50-300% can represent quite a range - a correlation relative to how badly systems are taxed by I/O inefficiencies in virtual environments that are subsequently streamlined by V-locity. While [...]
Largest-Ever I/O Performance Study
Over the last year, 2,654 IT Professionals took our industry-first I/O Performance Survey, which makes it the largest I/O performance survey of its kind. The key findings from the survey reveal an I/O performance struggle for virtualized organizations as 77% of all respondents indicated I/O performance issues after virtualizing. The [...]
V-locity 6.0 Solves Death by a Thousand Cuts in Virtual Environments
If you haven’t already heard the pre-announcement buzz on V-locity® 6.0 I/O reduction software that made a splash in the press, it’s being released in a couple weeks. To understand why it’s significant and why it’s an unprecedented 3X FASTER than its predecessor is to understand the biggest factor that [...]
3 Min Video on SAN Misconceptions Regarding Fragmentation
In just 3 minutes, George Crump, Sr Analyst at Storage Switzerland, explains the real problem around fragmentation and SAN storage, debunks misconceptions, and describes what organizations are doing about it. It should be noted, that even though he is speaking about the Windows OS on physical servers, the problem is [...]
SAN Fragmentation Controversy Incites Attack from NetApp
I can’t blame it all on NetApp. It all started with THIS TWEET. I’ll admit NetApp was misled by an inadvertent title from a well-intentioned editor at Searchstorage.com, but the CTO Office at NetApp obviously didn’t read the whole article beyond the headline. Dave Raffo, the Senior News Director for [...]
Is Fragmentation Robbing SAN Performance?
This month Condusiv® announced the most significant development in the Diskeeper® product line to date – expanding our patented fragmentation prevention capabilities beyond server local storage or direct-attached storage (DAS) to now include Storage Area Networks, making it the industry's first real-time fragmentation solution for SAN storage. Typically, as soon [...]
ER Can’t Afford Slow Patient Records
Slow medical record load times were hurting ER and overall patient care hospital-wide. Ryan Barker was responsible for overseeing the MEDITECH EHR systems at Hancock Regional. As he put it, “You can imagine how dire the situation can be, particularly in the ER. My users can’t spare precious seconds waiting [...]
The Biggest Missed Culprit in SQL Performance Troubleshooting
"We didn't know how much of our SQL performance was being dampened by the nasty 'I/O blender' effect….." As it turned out, it was HALF. That's right. Their systems were processing HALF as many MB/sec than they should due to the noise of all their VM workloads meeting and mixing [...]
Surprising Results: Meditech EHR Performance Survey
According to our recent survey to Meditech hospitals, half receive staff or customer complaints regarding EHR performance while the other half do not. Since virtualizing, 62% purchased a new SAN, 10% added SAS spindles, 20% added server-side SSDs or PCIe flash, 24% added storage-side SSDs, 38% added additional servers, and [...]
SQL Batch Job Hell
ASL was in SQL batch job hell. A regular import of 150 million records into their SQL database would take 27 hours to complete. ASL’s account team and clients needed access to the most current data immediately, but the 27 hour batch job meant that access would slip a full [...]
$2 Million Cancelled
CHRISTUS Health cancelled a $2 Million order. Just before they pulled the trigger on a $2 Million storage purchase to improve the performance of their electronic health records application (MEDITECH®), they evaluated V-locity® I/O reduction software. We actually heard the story first hand from the hardware vendor's reseller in the deal [...]
The Gartner Cool Vendor Report in Storage Technologies: Vanity or Value
We all like lists that rank who is cool, best in class or top score in a buyer’s guide. Every year, Gartner releases their prized "Cool Vendor" selection. But is it just vanity for the vendor selected or is there actual, tangible value to the prospective customer that makes you [...]
When Dave Cappuccio of Gartner Speaks, People Listen
As others entered the stage, there was perfunctory applause. However, when Dave entered a roar of applause erupted, and the event ground to a halt for several minutes. Sitting in the audience at Gartner Symposium 2013 over the next several days I saw this reaction several times. When Dave Cappuccio, [...]