Improved Performance Shouldn’t Mean More IT Hours
When one talks about improved performance in relation to an enterprise computer network, there are usually 2 sides to the equation: the performance of the programs and computers themselves, and the performance of the users. Ideally when a solution or application is brought into a company, one is talking about both. A performance-improving program should make it better all around–for the user and the equipment.
Of course there is also a third issue which many times gets ignored: the IT department. How many times is a solution brought in that will “decrease workload”, “improve employee performance” or “improve system performance” that means loads of extra hours for IT personnel? Due to a shortage of experienced, well-trained IT staff today, IT hours are at a premium. Hence, any “solution” brought in which makes more work for IT is increasing the financial burden of the company and slowing down IT service, despite how it might be decreasing that burden elsewhere. So we might add another element to our program requirements: it doesn’t increase the IT workload.
An example is the traditional defragmentation program. In theory, defragmentation should be assisting everyone by increasing performance all across an enterprise. But since most defragmentation programs are scheduled, they are also making more work for IT in ratio to the number of drives in a corporation that need to be regularly defragmented. Someone has to analyze drives for traffic load and schedule defragmentation on each and every one of those drives, and that someone has to be an experienced IT person. The higher the number of drives, the more hours weekly this takes.
Additionally, due to much larger files and drive capacities, scheduled fragmentation is no longer keeping up with the fragmentation problem–fragmentation is continuing to build between scheduled runs. And in the case of very large drives, scheduled defragmentation may not be defragmenting at all. Performance is still degrading which also negatively affects users and equipment.
The solution for defragmentation is one which takes into account all 3 elements in our portrait of ideal programs: it improves system performance, it improves user performance and it cuts the workload for IT. This is a completely automatic defragmentation solution, one which requires absolutely no scheduling. Since it defragments whenever otherwise-idle system resources are available, it also does a more thorough job of defragmenting–fragmentation is not continuing to build between scheduled runs.
The moral: when implementing any performance-increasing program, make sure IT hours and work are taken into account.
