Microsoft officially released the next version of Windows last week – Windows 8. While this new release contains various technological advancements, issues with I/O performance and its effect on Windows systems still remains.

Every I/O operation that occurs takes a measureable amount of time. There’s no such thing as an instant I/O request, and simply put, the more I/Os necessary, the longer it will take for Windows to complete a particular task. 

To understand why this is still an issue on Windows 8 and even Windows Server 2012, let’s explore a bit deeper. When data is written within the Windows file system, it is naturally written in a non-optimized way. Thus when an application requests the data, the initial I/O request generally gets broken down and  splits into many additional requests (called split I/Os), and thus increases the time necessary to retrieve the information. So, as this activity naturally occurs on a daily basis, it takes more and more I/O requests and increasingly impacts the performance of your servers and workstations. 

The Windows built-in optimization tool, which is set to run on a weekly basis, attempts to handle the mounting I/O traffic, but that’s after you’ve already experienced the performance impact in the first place. For example, say I’m working on a project on a Tuesday afternoon – how is running the built-in optimization utility on Wednesday going to address this concern?

Proactive Windows I/O acceleration is the key to successful operations and improved response time to users and this is why Condusiv Technologies created our Diskeeper product. Diskeeper’s InvisiTasking and IntelliWrite technologies helps prevent the vast majority of extra I/O requests from occurring and does so without taking any additional resources from the system or other applications. This ensures that you get the least number of I/Os to go to the storage and allows your applications to run that much faster. 

 In fact, recent independent testing by openBench labs shows up to 98% few I/O requests, server throughput increased by 130% and data throughput up to 5X faster on workstations. You can read more of this report here.

We recently responded to a forum post on our YouTube channel regarding SSDs and Defragmentation - you can view the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hznCSqb4Mzg

Below are some "before and after" graphs that provide proof that fragmentation affects SSDs:

Condusiv Technologies announced today worldwide availability of the next generation in application and storage performance software – Diskeeper 12. Condusiv has long been a leader in data performance solutions for millions of Windows®-based systems for over 30 years. From boosting application performance to extending hardware life and reducing IT traffic, Condusiv offerings ensure massive benefits on Windows servers, workstations and laptops. The latest release in this category is no exception.

Whether you’re running Windows XP or Windows 7, using SSD hard drives or accessing SANs, traditional approaches to defragmentation just aren’t going to cut it anymore. You have to take a new approach - you have to be proactive and you have to be automatic. Simply put – you need Diskeeper 12

“Condusiv Technologies Corporation, winner six times in a row, is unrelenting in its dominance of this category.” – 2011 Reader’s Choice Award: Best Disk Defragmentation and Drive Monitoring Tool, Redmond Magazine

When files are created, deleted, or modified, they can be broken up and scattered around a volume instead of written in one place. This makes retrieving information like trying to read a book whose pages are out of order, and it can quickly overwork the operating system and storage devices.

The best cure for a problem is to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Diskeeper 12 prevents fragmentation at the Windows level, allowing an application and storage system to write or read at peak performance – with one contiguous access – improving drive performance while extending the drive’s useful life.

All editions of Diskeeper 12 feature the breakthrough IntelliWrite® technology, which prevents the vast majority (up to 85% or more) of fragmentation from ever occurring.

InvisiTasking® technology has been redesigned in Diskeeper 12 to be more assertive in I/O active environments while still maintaining invisible processing. The enhancements will allow Diskeeper to accomplish more defragmentation and resolve it faster (e.g., Instant Defrag™), during typical production workloads.

In addition, Diskeeper 12 adds a host of new features:

-          HyperBoot®—New

o   HyperBoot technology has been incorporated into Diskeeper to improve system boot time.

-          CogniSAN™—New

o   Technology that detects external resource usage within a shared storage system, such as a SAN, and allows for transparent optimization by never competing for resources utilized by other systems over the same storage infrastructure without intruding in any way into SAN-layer operations. (Server editions only)

-          Disk Health—New

o   This feature monitors hard disk for S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) data to generate alerts and provides a disk health report, warns of critical problems or an imminent disk failure, generates by email.

-          System Monitoring—New

o   System Monitoring collects system environment activity and provides reporting on key elements. This includes statistical data about system I/O usage, disk state, and Diskeeper effectiveness. The option to send data for analysis at Condusiv Technologies also exists, providing a summary of the statistical data gathered for system performance monitoring purposes.

-          Space Reclamation engine—New

o   Allows the user to manually or automatically zero out unused space from thin provisioned volumes on SAN and disk array storage.

-          Enhanced HyperFast® with TRIM

o   A solid state drive optimizer is a proven optimizing technology for Solid State Drives (SSDs), providing faster performance and longer lifespan.

-          Titan Defrag Engine™ technology

o   The most powerful defrag engine ever built. Designed to meet ever growing storage demands on servers, Titan defragments volumes with massive amounts of data rapidly and thoroughly. Titan is included in the Server edition.

-          Terabyte Volume Engine® technology

o   Rapidly defragments multi-terabyte volumes. This engine, included in the Diskeeper 12 Professional edition, addresses the need to keep these systems running at top speed as the storage capacity of desktop systems increases.

 

Figure 1 A glimpse of the new look and feel in Diskeeper.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about built-in defragging systems. Is Windows®7 the best option? In the latest issue of Processor Magazine, experts weigh in, making the case for Diskeeper’s optimization in the enterprise. Read the whole article here: http://www.processor.com/articles//P3402/11p02/11p02.pdf?guid

Improve Data Performance 

For years, we have loved Diskeeper and the way it works in the background to keep your hard drives defragmented. Defragmentation programs have been available for decades, but Diskeeper is among the true innovators.With the release of 2011, the tool has gotten even better. 

Basic Bits 

Drive defragmenters aggregate the data—which drives normally break into chunks and store wherever necessary— into contiguous blocks. This speeds access time (and therefore system performance), and can literally prevent a drive from crashing.  Diskeeper takes a multipronged approach to defragmentation that eases its system impact and helps keep your drives humming along smoothly. For one thing, its IntelliWrite technology prevents fragmentation before it happens. Its new Efficient Mode feature improves the defragmenting process by identifying problem fragmentation. The Instant Defrag feature tidies up any leftover fragments it cannot process during the initial file save. Both of these happen on the fly, in the background,and with little to no impact on system resources.  

The full review is located here.

Mike sent us his Diskeeper 2011 Disk Performance Report showing 322,347 Disk Access I/Os saved! 

Mike is the winner of the drawing for the $100 American Express gift card!

Diskeeper Corporation was awarded the Gold Independent Software Vendor/Software Competency—the highest competency bestowed within the Microsoft Partner Network.

 “When you achieve a gold competency, you’ll represent organizations and associated individuals that have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment within a targeted Microsoft business solution area.”—Microsoft Partner Network Web Site 

To earn a Microsoft Gold Competency, organizations must complete a rigorous set of tests to prove their level of technology expertise, have the right number of Microsoft Certified Professionals, submit customer references and demonstrate their commitment to customer satisfaction by participating in an annual survey. The Microsoft Gold Competency signifies to the market that a company has demonstrated the highest level of skill and achievement within a given technology specialization.  

“It is  Diskeeper Corporation’s job to provide Windows users with the fastest, most reliable, longest lasting and energy efficient systems possible,” notes Derek De Vette, Diskeeper VP for Global Alliances & Partner Affairs. “Working closely with Microsoft’s Partner Network competency program ensures that our technology meets the highest standards possible for our enterprise class customers.”

Dear CIO,

One of the most positive things to come out of the recession is a deeper appreciation of how much an efficient IT impacts corporate competiveness and profitability. And no wonder: envisioning and acting upon business opportunities requires having a powerful and flexible data center to work with.

In the real world, most networks are patchworks of legacy and cutting edge tech. Despite the best efforts of IT managers, IT investments take longer to recover and cost of operations creeps steadily upward.

Imagine a product that automatically ensured Windows systems ran at the peak speeds they were designed to deliver, reliably, using less energy and for a longer lifespan. Imagine the effect on operating costs and value return.

Hundreds of your peers in Global 1000 companies and Federal and State agencies don’t have to imagine this because this product exists and they refuse to run their networks without it: Diskeeper performance technology for Windows systems.

I am the CEO of the company that makes Diskeeper and I run the team behind the product. We’ve been around for 30 years; we’re in for the long term and we’d like an opportunity to help you achieve your IT goals faster.  

A simple evaluation on your IT network will show you the Diskeeper business value far better than I can say. Here is a link to quickly download a trial evaluation of Diskeeper. I suggest you have your IT manager test it out and report back to you. https://www.diskeeper.com/landing/diskeeper-30-day-trialware.aspx

Best,

Lisa Terrenzi

CEO

Diskeeper Corporation   

If you're a Windows Home Server enthusiast, you've no doubt heard the unfortunate news that Drive Extender (DE) is being removed from the upcoming new version of WHS (codename Vail).

DEv2 was, by all accounts, an ambitious project, designed to solve many storage problems for numerous Windows platforms (Aurora, Vail, Breckenridge).  We'd had written about a technology partnership planned to assist with "garbage collection" for DE. The need to call in Diskeeper Corporation, I believe, was an indicator of the ultimate cause for its cancellation. Apart from time/resources, a.k.a. "money", there is no reason MS could not have solved the problem we were asked to help with, or any other problems for that matter.

The talent on the WHS team was certainly there, we know them well. The Technical PM for DE was a seventeen year vet at Diskeeper Corporation having formerly been the PM here for Undelete. A key consultant on the project was a file system guru who had worked with Diskeeper in the 1990's to implement kernel level code into Windows to make defrag, as we know it today, possible. We've had numerous meetings over the past many months and knew their challenges well.

WARNING! Objects in mirror are closer farther that they appear:

In science and technology, the end product often looks closer at the outset that it really is. You can only predict so much at the start. As you move along in research and development, many unknowns crop up that you have to understand and address. When you do finally reach the end of the road and look back, you realize you had to go a lot farther to get to the finish that you expected.

One case in point is the reason DEv2 used separate drive letters for each share. That was a solution to ensure that Windows Search would function. Windows Search does not work on "mounted volumes", which would be a superior user experience to assigning separate letters to each volume/share. Could Windows Search have been enhanced to support mounted volumes - yes (it is just software after all). However, that is another team at MS.

Now if WHS revenue was flooding billions in the MS bank account, Windows Search limitations would have been resolved lickity-split. As Paul Thurrott noted in an article yesterday, WHS is a niche product, that probably doesn't generate tremendous revenue for Microsoft. We developed Diskeeper HomeServer edition because we here love WHS (the company founder and top technical execs are all avid users), but mostly because we are committed to Microsoft's success - which is ultimately good for our business.

Niche products and pilot projects tend to be sandboxed and rarely get access to resources from other division within a company - and generally that is the right thing to do.  

At the end of the day, I believe (just my personal opinion) that the WHS team simply had to develop too many features for too many purposes and had to invent too many workarounds to make those features work. The decision to cut features and make a deadline is the most difficult one for software managers.

Anyway, I hold out hope that we'll see DE/DEv2 in the future. DE itself can be a solution foundation for future of Windows storage. Just one thought that crosses my mind is "what if DE merged local and cloud storage?" A user enabling folder duplication, if cloud storage services were activated, could replicate right into the cloud without the need for another layer of backup products/staging?

There is still significant value in Vail. The thing that really distinguishes WHS from NAS devices is that WHS is a platform whereas NAS is an appliance. Appliances will do next year the same thing they do today - which may work for many. A platform, through new/added software, can be customized to be a great variety of things. You build onto the platform whatever you want it to do for you, and as you grow, it can grow with you.  Because of that potential, it's amassed a base of passionate users with very high expectations (rightfully so).  

One cool thing about WHS is the ecosystem that has evolved around it. I fully expect that any shortcomings in Vail will be addressed soon-enough in after market solutions, so I'll wait before I pass judgment on Vail and decisions to upgrade.

We didn't win the 2010 Windows IT Pro Editor's Choice for Best System Utility this year (we won last year). While we lost out to a couple consumer/small-biz software suites, we're the only awarded enterprise system performance solution of the group (a group that encompasses various non-competitive products), so we're content with Bronze. You can read the full article here. 

Windows IT Pro recently undertook a survey of users who have applied Diskeeper across their network. The purpose was to uncover the benefits achieved from this solution.

It covers points such as...

Increased hardware life, and reduction in unnecessary I/O:

Improved system stability and less crashes:

Less drive failures and data loss:

Faster backups and bootups:

Their conclusion?

“Low overhead in system resources, significant documented potential improvements in performance and reliability, along with the improved user productivity and better IT resource utilization demonstrate beyond a doubt that Diskeeper software isn’t just a “nice to have” option in your standard system configuration for the effective business IT department. It is a “must have” in order to obtain the best possible performance and ROI on your servers and workstations.”

Read the full paper here: Windows IT Pro Reliability white paper.pdf (2.10 mb)

Diskeeper 2010 was reviewed on Top Ten Reviews and won the Gold award.

Diskeeper offers a large list of powerful features for both general computer users and advanced experts. Diskeeper is a top performer, surpassing all the other disk defragmenter software reviewed as a result of its impressive feature set and very fast performance.

The video is also here.

Here is a quote: "Over several weeks of analysis, Diskeeper 2010 stayed its course with little to no deviation of performance results. I would recommend Diskeeper 2010 as a standard feature on ALL PC's. It will extend the period of functionality of a PC without failure significantly. This will provide a valuable contribution to eco-friendly business concerns."  

Diskeeper Corporation is glad to announce exhibiting at the upcoming Interop New York show, "The Leading Business Technology Event". 

The show is October 20th and 21st at the Javits Center.  Come by and see us at booth 725. We will have free trialware of Diskeeper 2010 performance software, V-locity 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer, and Undelete 2009 real time data protection software.

This is from one of our customers: “The biggest benefit from Diskeeper I see is not so much in direct user experience, but rather reduced downtime from HDD failures which in turn saves me money in capital expenditures as I can squeeze more life out of my hardware. By continuously keeping the drives defragged, they don’t have to work as hard when files are accessed, and therefore don’t have to absorb the same level of wear and tear which equates to longer life with fewer replacements etc. Typically when machines leave warranty, the HDD is one of the first components to die but with Diskeeper, the HDD stay healthy and operational much, much longer so I can extend my hardware refresh cycle from 3 years to 4 or 4 ½ years and refocus my capital dollars on more strategic initiatives.

InvisiTasking technology, which can be found in all of Diskeeper Corporation's publicly available products, is much more than a simple method hoping to take advantage of a computer's idle time and/or adjust I/O priority; it's an advanced processing technology. Due to it's truly unique and innovative design, InvisiTasking has been awarded multiple patents. There is nothing out there like it.

We have a dedicated website for software manufacturers interested in licensing InvisiTasking technology for use in their respective software solutions. I've borrowed the technology description (italicized copy below) we have posted on that site for any interested to know more about its underlying objective.

The technology's name is a portmanteau of the words "invisible" and "multitasking". After reading the description below the reason that multitasking is part of the name should make a great deal more sense.

Since the beginnings of shared computers in the 1960s, computer operating systems have scheduled jobs to run in a round robin fashion, allocated the entire resources of the computer system to each job, one at a time. The fact that the scheduler switched jobs every few milliseconds made it appear that all the jobs were running at the same time, in parallel, when in fact, they were running serially, one at a time. Diagrammatically, it looked like this:

Round Robin Scheduling


Our Micro Job Scheduler (i.e. InvisiTasking) is a fundamental and dramatic improvement on how jobs are scheduled. A modern computer consists of four components: CPU, memory, disk and network. While round robin scheduling allocates all four of these components to each job, resource-based scheduling allocates each component separately. Suppose, in these diagrams, the blue job requires a lot of CPU time, but very little memory or disk; the red job requires a lot of disk activity, but very little CPU or memory; and the green job requires a lot of memory, but very little CPU or disk. These three jobs can run simultaneously without impacting the performance of either of the other two jobs, and that is exactly what the Micro Job Scheduler does. Diagrammatically, it looks like this: 

Micro Job Scheduling


What’s more, the Micro Job Scheduler analyzes each job and separates it into micro jobs based on the resources required by each part. It then optimally schedules the micro jobs so more work gets done in less time. This results in a dramatic performance increase for all jobs. 

• Diskeeper 2010 is fully functional and operates correctly as intended on systems using the FDCC under Windows XP and Windows Vista.
• The standard installation, operation, maintenance, update of Diskeeper 2010 does not alter the configuration settings from the approved FDCC configuration. Diskeeper uses the Windows Installer Service for installation to the default "program files" directory and is able to silently install and uninstall.
• The Diskeeper 2010 performed correctly on a standard user level account in all functional areas on both operating systems.

You can contact your Public Sector Account Representative at Diskeeper Corporation with any questions about Diskeeper 2010 FDCC compliance.

Find out more about the FDCC here.

I came across a cool "how to" video today. It covers steps to keep a high-end rig running three SSDs in top form. The http://www.sirjamesd.com/ also happens to use HyperFast as part of his toolkit.

You can check it out here: http://www.30monitor.com/keeping-your-ssd-running-brilliant/

On another note, while the author is running Diskeeper Pro Premier, if you only have SSDs in your PC, save yourself some money and just get Diskeeper Home edition with HyperFast. The features in DK Professional and Pro Premier (I-FAAST and TVE) are only useful for HDD.

I'll cover more on I-FAAST and talk about TRIM and defrag in more detail in a follow up post. You can also see this post for some test data from a joint Microsoft/Diskeeper Corporation seminar.

Here's a cool succes about something many IT pro's wouldn't normally associate with defrag:

When we began to invest in Diskeeper we had 8 servers and over 100+ clients that ran for years and would run for many more years. Every 11 weeks we start a new quarter and cycled on average 400 users across all of them each quarter. So you can image the amount of data our students move across these machines. Not to mention the amount of data that is moved across our servers with 600+ users. 

Diskeeper drastically improved our disk performance and kept it constant with the automatic defragmentation during idle time. Diskeeper not only helped with maintaining the disk performance, but also made it possible for quick disaster recovery.

We had an old file server that crashed and file backups were being neglected, so we had to run file recovery on the RAID 5 array. Without Diskeeper automatically defragging the drive and keeping all the pieces of the files together, we would have lost 50% of the data; instead we were able to recover 95% of the 300 Gb of information. 

Aaron Cowell,

Network Administrator,

Davis College, Toledo, OH

Proud supporter of:

ShoreTel VOIP, Moodle, Microsoft, Diskeeper