Fragmentation Prevention and Real-Time Transactions

BURBANK, Calif.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--There are situations in which system response time is important—and there are those in which it is absolutely vital. Within a business, it is obviously important that employees experience good computer response time in order to accomplish their work, and handle both internal and external communications. But today, an enterprise’s system is not only an interface for employees, but for prospects and customers as well. When it comes to the public, that’s where lost performance can mean lost business.

“We bill for over 300 different companies”

Prospects and customers interact with a company in numerous ways, which include simple web browsing all the way up through and including highly detailed transactions. When a customer has made it all the way to purchase, you certainly don’t want them to experience computer slowdowns from your end. They’re already sold; for something to stand in their way as they’re actually buying the service or product is going to cause considerable upset. The chances of them returning after such an experience are slim to none—and they’re likely to tell their friends and associates as well.

The prime cause of slow system performance is file fragmentation. When a file is split (fragmented) into thousands or tens of thousands of pieces, it means considerable extra I/O traffic to retrieve each file. If the process requiring a fragmented file is being utilized by a customer, that means the customer has to wait.

“We bill for over 300 different companies,” said Chuck Sisson, President of Money Movers, Inc. of Sebastopol, California. “At times, we are running 20,000 credit card transactions from 20 workstations, from 1 file server—every hour. This process is time-critical across the network and the internet. It is absolutely critical that the server has virtually NO fragmentation.”

Today, many sites—including Sisson’s—utilize Diskeeper^® performance software to ensure that fragmentation is always addressed and is never a hindrance. Utilizing a new revolutionary technology called IntelliWrite^™ fragmentation prevention, Diskeeper 2010 intelligently writes files to the disk to prevent up to 95 percent of fragmentation from occurring. Coupled with Diskeeper’s superior defragmentation technology, Diskeeper 2010 delivers a complete performance solution for every Windows system at every site, and goes far beyond what defragmentation alone can achieve. Significant savings are also achieved reducing energy consumption and cooling—even more than is done with conventional defragmentation.

All of these operations occur invisibly, in the background, in real time, so that fragmentation is never an issue. The software never needs to be scheduled, and there is never a negative performance impact on users. Crucial systems are always at peak performance and reliability.

“Diskeeper has successfully maintained this file server’s integrity,” Sisson said. “I depend on it.”