In today’s computing environment, uptime is a critical factor. This is because information technology has slowly crept up from the supporting position it had years back–suddenly we look up and IT is not merely enhancing business operations, it in itself has become business operations. When a customer is placing an order, it is directly or nearly directly with a computer. When a shipment is received by a customer, the receiving signature is scanned and receipt is immediately confirmed through a computer. Messaging, quotes, accounting, inventory–they’re all done straight through automated systems that cannot afford downtime.
Now that so many servers are “front and center” and must run 24X7, time to perform tasks such as anti-virus, backups and defrag has become incredibly scarce. So scarce, in fact, that some sites put off defrag until performance is absolutely intolerable and the only choice is to bring a ystem down and run a manual or scheduled defragmentation.
Jim Bernal, Senior Network Engineer with Howe Barnes Hoefer & Arnett in Chicago, Illinois, found out just how bad it can get. “We constantly had servers running slowly and getting really fragmented from constant file access and over time file access would almost halt or take minutes to access a file,” Bernal said. “We also had problems with users logging in with domain controllers sometimes rejecting users because of timeouts in communicating with our DNS servers.”
Like many sites today, Bernal’s company was running the whole gamut of services and applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, fileservers, domain controllers, print servers, Terminal Services, Live Communications servers, accounting software, SharePoint and Virtual Services servers for virtualization.
But also like many sites, Bernal’s fortunately discovered Diskeeper with InvisiTasking–a completely automatic defrag solution. Diskeeper utilizes only otherwise-idle system resources, so defrag takes place whenever and wherever possible. There is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation, and no scheduling is ever required. Performance is always maximized, so systems can remain up and running.
“Since I have upgraded the servers to Diskeeper, our servers have been up almost 99 percent of the time with no downtime, except to install updates from Microsoft or when a server reboot was necessary,” Bernal said. “And file access is lightning fast.”
Today, taking your systems down is the same as taking part of your business down. Diskeeper with InvisiTasking means–at least for defrag–you never have to.
