Today more than ever, being a CIO is a challenging position. Qualified, experienced IT personnel have become a scarcity. In order to be cost effective, CIOs must ensure that business and IT goals are closely aligned. For progressive CIOs, part of achieving all of these goals is making IT as automated as possible.
An IT staff, as anyone who has been there knows, already has a very overfull plate. When routine tasks are added to the implementation and debugging of hardware and applications and the handling of routine emergencies, it means longer hours for–and lengthening response times from–IT personnel. And when a disaster such as a power outage or a sudden malware infection occurs in such circumstances, it can bring an enterprise to a dead stop.
Upgrades and patch distribution and installation, backups, disaster recovery, user preferences and tendencies, and resource allocation are just a few of the time-consuming routine activities which should be fully automated within a corporation. Doing so makes it possible for precious IT hours to be devoted to more valuable tasks.
To this list–and perhaps at the top of it–should be added automatic defragmentation. File fragmentation is one of the most basic blocks to fast system performance and response, and the addressing of it can be a hidden drain on IT hours and resources. Most corporations are still utilizing scheduled defragmentation, which means defragmentation must be scheduled so that access to volumes is consistently fast. It not only needlessly burns up IT hours, in today’s frantic computing environments it is no longer effective; fragmentation continues to build up and impact performance in between scheduled runs, and in some cases of very large volumes isn’t even defragmenting at all.
Since CIOs have cost-cutting as a priority, it should also be noted that since scheduled fragmentation is not fully addressing the fragmentation problem, disk drives have to work harder to process I/O requests. Half to three-quarters of the expected life of a disk drive can be eliminated by the excess wear and tear due to access of fragmented files. Hence it greatly behooves an enterprise to implement a solution which will truly do the job.
A fully automatic defragmentation solution addresses all of these problems. It requires no scheduling, so valuable IT hours can be spent elsewhere. It defragments whenever and wherever possible, so system performance is constantly maintained, and hardware life is assured. It uses only idle resources so there is no negative performance hit during defragmentation.
