Astute risk management defines success in the insurance industry. Premiums charged to the company’s customers reflect that relation of risk to profit, while the riskiest ventures are avoided entirely. Translating risk to the IT world would likely bring security software solutions to mind. Not managing those risks can result in data loss, corporate espionage, and other nasty events.
It may come as a surprise that file fragmentation can be risky business too. Fragmentation creates many more unattractive side effects than a slow computer. The insurance policyholder who smokes is a higher risk than the one who does not, and subsequently they pay a higher premium.
What about hard drives? The hard drives that have to work harder due to fragmentation are also at higher risk. They, too, come at a higher cost — more help desk calls. Part of the long-term ramifications of file fragmentation is more and unnecessary I/O activity over the drive’s life — wearing it out faster.
On-site visits by IT staff to a user’s workspace due to hardware problems incur significant cost. With research showing that hard drives rival the power supply as the “most-replaced” component in a computer, solutions applied to minimize those replacements can save the company significant hardware costs and IT repair overhead.
It’s fairly well known that defragmented files mean faster file writes and retrievals. However, file fragmentation, if not handled, will build up to the point that reliability is jeopardized. Managing risk is the key to survival in the Insurance industry, and those same concepts can be carried over to IT.
Fragmentation affects the servers just as much as the PCs, if not more so. Servers host data that multiple users, maybe hundreds, need access to. The hardware is more powerful, but the demands are far greater. Waiting for data is bad enough when the end user is staring at an hourglass, but it’s even worse if that employee is engaged with a policyholder, because now the customer has to wait as well.
Automatic defrag keeps file access optimized, so those users get consistent peak performance, and customers get the rapid service they expect. With such heavy competition in the insurance industry, quality of service can be a major competitive advantage.
At the core of Diskeeper is InvisiTasking. This innovative technology guarantees zero overhead from Diskeeper on other processes and users, allowing totally invisible operation. The application of InvisiTasking is a revolutionary approach to solving fragmentation — defrag in real time. The new methodology replaces antiquated defrag “passes” with the viewpoint of handling fragmentation as it occurs, but only using wasted computers resources to do so. The net result is no fragmentation build up, and constant peak performance as the file is already contiguous the next time it is requested.
InvisiTasking also ensures that by solving fragmentation you haven’t inexorably created a new job for yourself in the form of daily management of that new application. Security programs require regular updating, so do operating systems with monthly patches, and those processed need to be scheduled. InvisiTasking allows Diskeeper to be an autonomous application.
Contact: Colleen Toumayan
Email:ctoumayan@diskeeper.com
