“If you’re gonna drive to Cleveland, make sure your car will make it.” Such practical advice, or advice very similar, has been handed down by parents to wanderlust-smitten youngsters for many years. Simply translated, it means to make sure you have a working automobile that you know is going to get you safely and comfortably wherever it is you are going.
The same could be said for a company on its journey to financial success and glory, as regards their computer system. For the mission of the company, for the predicted number of employees, for the work that needs to be accomplished on a regular basis, is that system adequate and maintained to run at peak performance so it will get them there?
It starts, of course, with hardware. Regularly analyze the company and make sure there are enough servers, workstations, and hard drives to continuously get the job done. This also goes for peripherals such as printers, network cabling, and all the other material that collectively make up a system. This could be likened to making sure you have a running car in the first place.
Next up, of course, is the software chosen. It starts with the operating system, but applications are just as important. They should be chosen wisely and tested thoroughly. Are they easy to use, or is there a year-long learning curve for employees? Are they easy to maintain and upgrade? And last but certainly not least, how good is the support? This could be liked to how features are installed in the car. You want the user to be easily able to do things like turn on the lights and operate the turn signals without fumbling about and possibly running off the road.
Another top basic concern is defragmentation. If disks are not consistently defragmented, especially in today’s computing climate of enormous files and high-capacity disk drives, file fragmentation slows down production like dirty oil and bad gasoline will slow down a car, no matter how good the hardware, operating system, or applications. And don’t rely on scheduled defragmentation; scheduling has become near impossible with servers that can never be taken offline, and in between the scheduled runs fragmentation continues to make for performance that runs in fits and starts.
Defragmentation solutions today must be fully automatic, run invisibly in the background, and require no scheduling. Performance is always maximized. Because only otherwise-idle system resources are used, there is never a negative performance impact from defragmentation. Best of all, systems are maintained so that the computer system will assist the company to really and truly get where they’re going.
If you’re going to drive to Cleveland, make sure your car will make it. And if you’re going to utilize a computer system to raise your company to ultimate success, make sure that system will make it, too!
