“Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” These wise words, uttered some two hundred years ago by Benjamin Franklin, have perhaps never been truer than they are today. In the last two years especially, the U.S. economy has seemed teetering on the brink of disaster, only kept in check by cautiously advanced hopes and quick but furtive moves by a few major corporations, financial institutions and government agencies. Needless to say companies have been watching their bottom lines carefully, making every preparation possible to survive lean times while at the same time aggressively pushing sales and delivery.
Since computer costs are a major portion of many a company’s budget, many enterprises have been combing their IT cost analyses looking for ways to trim any fat that’s left. One item that may be easily overlooked isn’t “fat” at all, but something which may be assumed to be already taken care of: file fragmentation. The splitting of files into pieces–fragments–in order to better utilize disk space was in itself originally a cost-cutting method that, it was quickly discovered, slowed computer performance to a crawl. A solution was quickly found for the earlier “solution”, and thus an entire industry, defragmentation, was born. Unfortunately, unseen by many IT personnel and executives, many defragmentation methods are no longer performing adequately and are hidden and unnecessary costs themselves.
Because it so drastically affects computer performance, fragmentation affects nearly every aspect of company operations. Every employee accesses files; waiting for those files costs precious time and money from one end of the corporation to the other, from accounting to sales to inventory. Fragmentation also directly affects an IT budget because it takes an unnecessary toll on hardware due to increased disk access and help desk calls.
Many companies may assume that fragmentation is being regularly addressed by scheduled defragmentation. And therein lies the hidden cost: due to today’s vastly increased disk capacities, file sizes and fragmentation rates, fragmentation is continuing to build between scheduled runs. As it builds, it continues to negatively affect performance.
Additionally, valuable IT hours are having to be spent scheduling defragmentation.
For anyone seeking to further cut IT costs, today’s answer to fragmentation is a completely automatic solution, one that requires no scheduling, one that defragments using only idle resources, and one that constantly addresses fragmentation with no negative performance hit. In today’s IT environment, such a solution is the only way to completely address fragmentation, maximize performance and reliability and eliminate fragmentation as a problem forever.
