Trimming Time from Business Processes:
Fragmentation and the Slow Computer
In business, especially today, speed is of the essence. He who gets the best product to market, and gets it widely known and accepted before others, wins. This must continue well after a product is released. There is ongoing delivery and servicing of that product. There is constant improvement of that product. And lastly, there are all the internal processes within a company: promotion and marketing, sales, manufacturing and inventory if applicable, delivery, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and a multitude of others which, added up, equal the smooth, fast operation of an enterprise–or the lack thereof.
A cornerstone to nearly every business process is a computer network. In order to facilitate the myriad of other processes, a system must operate as quickly as possible. It must deliver up needed files, database records, and transactions, and perform functions and lightning speed. The faster a system is able to perform, the faster an employee can get his or her job done and the faster a business process will operate. One basic hindrance to a computer system is something known as file fragmentation–a disease common to all computers everywhere.
File fragmentation is the splitting of files into pieces (fragments) so that hard drive space is better utilized. It is a blessing that became a curse; while it certainly does save disk space, it also greatly slows system response. When a file is requested, an individual request is needed for each and every fragment of that file to be accessed. The larger number of fragments, the longer it takes for that file to come up on the user’s screen. And the number of fragments can be staggering; it can number in the tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions.
In order to treat this disease and restore speed to business processes, many companies have turned to defragmenters which gather all these fragments and, as much as possible, assemble them back into single files for faster access. These defragmenters were often scheduled to run in off-hours when the least number of users are accessing a system.
But today, scheduled defragmentation has become an inefficient business process itself. The time it takes to schedule robs IT personnel of precious hours needed to perform high-priority tasks. In between scheduled runs fragmentation continues to build, impacting performance–and processes–company-wide.
The answer to fully restoring performance in today’s computer environments is a fully automatic fragmentation solution, one which requires no scheduling and one which defragments whenever idle system resources are available. Maximum computer response is achieved constantly–and it’s the elimination of one more barrier to your business processes.
