Defragmentation Is Prime Among Cost-Cutting Measures
If business could be boiled down to simplicity, it could be said that companies are constantly engaged in two main activities: a constant search for new and better ways to market their products and a constant eye on the bottom line to cut operating costs. In nearly all business sectors, competition is fierce and survival is only of the fittest, so only those enterprises which are skilled in both these operations win. A prime cost-cutting focus for any company should be on a seemingly lowly factor–computer file fragmentation.
Today nearly all aspects of corporate operation are based in computers. While computers have raised business processes to unheard-of heights in terms of efficiency, they still have limitations. File fragmentation–the splitting of files into multiple parts to better fit on a hard drive–is a main limitation and one which, not fully addressed, can bring operations to a near-standstill. Files can be fragmented into tens, hundreds or thousands of fragments, and each fragment requires a computer operation to access it. A file which theoretically should take one or two requests can then require tens, hundreds or thousands. Computer performance becomes maddeningly slow, and users wait for data instead of working and completing tasks.
Fragmentation affects every operation of a company. Sales personnel wait for prospect records or for quotes to be generated. Finance people wait for spreadsheets. Delivery waits for shipping orders. And everybody waits for email–now often the sole method of communication between personnel, offices and between companies and the public.
Additionally, due to the extra hard-drive activity associated with fragmentation, hardware life is shortened.
Most, if not all, enterprises have addressed fragmentation with a scheduled defragmentation solution, the de facto standard for many years. Defragmenters can be scheduled to run during off-hours when performance won’t be negatively impacted, and many think the problem is handled.
In the current computing scenario, however, scheduled defragmentation has become outmoded and the fragmentation problem is anything but handled. With commerce having become world-wide, “off hours” are quickly becoming a thing of the past, and some users are going to have performance affected while the defragmenter is running. In between scheduled defragmentation runs, fragmentation is continuing to build and in some cases isn’t even being addressed. Fragmentation is continuing to shorten hard-drive life-spans.
The only truly cost-cutting method for today’s computing environment is a fully automatic solution, one that requires no scheduling, one that will not negatively impact users because it only utilizes idle resources, and one that will be addressing fragmentation whenever possible. Such a solution is the only way that fragmentation can be fully addressed and computer performance and reliability can be maximized.
