As seen from top-level management, there is a broad spectrum of technological issues that need to be addressed. There is always a management agenda which might include lifecycle management, new CRM implementations, business/automation alignment and other broad goals. Below the level of such objectives the goal can become a general “IT exists to keep employees productive on computers”–and IT’s recommendations about “lower level” issues, such as defragmentation methods, might be put aside.
An executive sees a company from an overall viewpoint, and it is therefore understandable that recommendations from lower on the command chain might go unheeded. At the same time, however, the viewpoint from the “troops on the ground” can be invaluable as they are dealing with the day-to-day problems and operations; it is they who are having to put in the overtime that keeps appearing on the budgets you keep having to approve month after month and quarter after quarter. When a recommendation appears that could save a substantial amount of those extra IT hours as well as provide a performance boost to the entire company, attention might be warranted.
File fragmentation is one of the most basic problems affecting computers, but often mistakenly ignored. The splitting of files into pieces (fragments) to better utilize disk space has been around almost as long as computing itself, and so has the technology of defragmentation to address the problem.
For the last 15 years or so, defragmentation has been scheduled so that it ran during off-hours–if run during production hours, it would negatively impact performance while running. But what might be unseen by corporate management–but clearly seen by IT personnel–is the fact that scheduled defragmentation has become outmoded and is no longer keeping systems fully defragmented. Due to file sizes and disk capacities having grown dramatically over the last several years, fragmentation is continuing to compound in between scheduled runs and, in the case of very large disk drives, may not be being addressed at all. The result from an IT standpoint is extra IT hours spent trying to schedule defragmentation and also to address the performance problems being created by the lack of an adequate solution.
Today, the only real adequate solution–as your IT department might be telling you–is a completely automatic solution, one that runs invisibly in the background. Such a solution requires no scheduling, so valuable IT hours are saved. Defragmentation technology adequate to the particular defragmentation job being performed is used, so defragmentation is always complete. Because only idle resources are used, defragmentation never causes a negative performance impact.
Listen to your IT department–it could save your enterprise considerable time and money.
