It’s almost a fact of life that IT personnel are going to put in many extra hours over and above the normal “9 to 5” schedule. There’s just too much to do: hardware needs to be maintained and updated, new applications and versions need to be tested and deployed, and many routine tasks that fall between the cracks during normal hours need to be performed. For companies always keeping an eye to that ever-critical bottom line (and who isn’t), anything that would reduce such overtime would be highly beneficial.
One vital task that must always be performed is defragmentation. This is for apparent reasons; file fragmentation can destroy performance and can even cause system hangs and failures. For years, defragmentation has been scheduled so it could run during off hours–but interestingly scheduled defragmentation has now become one of those chores that is helping contribute to IT off hours.
This is a bit of irony because scheduled defragmentation was originally invented to prevent system administrators from having to work nights and weekends to defragment hard drives. And originally it did help greatly–IT personnel could set up schedules for the various drives and leave, knowing that the drives would be defragmented in the morning.
Why has this now become a problem? For one thing, the number of drives has madly proliferated, and each and every one of those drives must be analyzed and have a proper schedule set for it. Another factor–and probably a more important one–is that scheduled defragmentation is no longer keeping up with today’s out-of-control rates of fragmentation. Because file sizes and disk capacities have grown so dramatically, fragmentation continues to build and cripple performance in between those scheduled runs. And in some cases, as with very large drives, scheduled defragmentation isn’t defragmenting at all. It’s no wonder that defragmentation has once again become a task that has to be handled in overtime.
The answer to this situation is a completely automatic defragmentation solution that requires no scheduling. It utilizes only idle resources, hence it defragments a drive whenever possible. This solves two major problems with defragmentation: it no longer requires endless analysis and configuring of schedules by IT personnel, and it truly keeps drives defragmented so that performance is always running at maximum.
While there are a plethora of problems to be solved for all IT overtime to become a thing of the past, defragmentation can now be removed from the long list of off-hours tasks.
