Being an IT director or working in an IT department usually means automatic overload and a thankless job. Uneducated users wonder why files got deleted (when they did it themselves). Complaints flood across your desk about slow database access, email, and a host of other problems. Unbeknownst to the users, you also have new hardware to install, existing hardware to maintain, programs to update, upgrade or patch, security to maintain, and a whole strategy to follow to mirror business activities. In the midst of all this, you also have to find time to schedule defragmentation so that fragmentation won’t slow performance and cause a whole other pile of complaints.
A large portion of your job is obviously servicing users so they can do their jobs. But with tasks, fires and challenges coming at you from everywhere, it’s not always possible to get to every user’s problem when they need it handled. Scheduling defragmentation is yet another task you must handle to keep the users happy, but unfortunately the time it takes to do the scheduling actually takes away from the time to service those same users.
Defragmentation, fortunately, is one area where you could actually save considerable time. Right now, you’re probably having to analyze the system for high levels of fragmentation then set defragmenter schedules to defragment those volumes that need it most. That is time that you could be spending more directly servicing company employees. A completely automatic defragmenter that requires no scheduling is the answer–one which simply utilizes idle system resources whenever they are available and defragments whenever and wherever possible.
In addition to the lack of need for scheduling, there are other ways automatic defragmentation would also better service you and your users. Because of today’s larger file sizes, high capacity disks, and dramatic rate of fragmenting files, scheduled defragmentation has become outmoded. In between scheduled runs, fragmentation continues to build and impact performance. And in some cases the defragmenter isn’t actually affecting the fragmentation at all. This means you’re probably getting complaints about performance even though you are defragmenting!
A fully automatic defragmenter, because it works whenever idle system resources are available, is more thorough than scheduled defragmentation and is able to keep up with today’s fragmentation rates. This means that performance is consistently maximized.
So automatic defragmentation makes you the IT hero in two ways. First, your time is freed up from no longer having to schedule defragmentation, which means you can provide better service to users. But second, performance from automatic defragmentation is going to be better, and guess who gets the credit for that?
