If you currently resell software or have considered reselling, checkout our newly launched partner portal. If you want to partner with Diskeeper, ideally you would register and get a login, but you don't need one. From the main page click the "Software" link at the top, or simply go to this page and follow the nav on the left. We have overhauled the site providing more resources and promotions to make it easier for partners to make money with Diskeeper. As part of our growing effort to extend more personalized service to our partners, we have an excellent page allowing one to rapidly get in touch with the Diskeeper employee that handles your specific needs. -Paul

Apparently a lot of people do! Diskeeper recently surpassed the 20 million licenses sold mark. -Paul

Virtual server defragmentation is getting even more attention with the media coverage of our recent partnership initiative with Microsoft. In case anybody missed it, Microsoft's recent announcement mentioned us as one of their key partners involved in pushing forward virtualization technology. See articles in Redmond Magazine, InformationWeek, and CRN. Many IT professionals are currently using Diskeeper to defragment Virtual Server 2005 and VMWare with much success, however there is still work to be done to ensure that the most thorough defragmentation job can be achieved on the host and virtual levels. These technical challenges are why Microsoft has tapped us yet again to push forward defragmentation technology on the Windows platform. Server virtualization has the effect of making the mechanical disk drive an even bigger bottleneck. As I've said before on this blog, automatic defragmentation should play a key part in your virtualization strategy. —Paul

Regarding my last entry: Someone pointed out (correctly) that the article from Microsoft was not in fact new. I had picked it up on my google alerts and had some difficulty verifying the date it was written. I offer my apologies for the mistake. I also want to point out that some of the commenters on my entry are confused about free space defragmentation. All 3rd party defragmenters defragment free space. Everyone agrees that it needs to be defragmented. The only question is to what degree. Some in the industry have promoted free space "consolidation" or the putting of all the free space into one-pool as an attempt at product differentiation. We disagree with this approach of putting it into one-pool, and always have. Has Diskeeper improved over the years at free space defragmentation? Yes. Should we suddenly switch to "consolidate" free space into one-pool? No. The point of my last post was to point out that the one-pool philosophy is incorrect. Going the extra mile to put all of the free space into one-pool is a waste of resources as it only temporarily creates a pretty disk map. In the article I referenced, Microsoft also endorses a different approach when they state that free space should be in, "a few contiguous portions of the disk." I will let the Diskeeper Product Manager Michael elaborate further.

There has been some confusion in the past regarding free space defragmentation. Some people in the industry believed that after a defragmentation job free space should be consolidated into one pool. Here at Diskeeper Corporation we have long since maintained that this doesn't make sense (see our whitepaper on this very subject). Moving free space into one consolidated pool is a temporary condition that wastes resources and serves no purpose. Instead free space should be grouped in a few contiguous pools. I was happy to see Microsoft has recently validated our longstanding position. Checkout the section on free space fragmentation in the new Microsoft TechNet article, Maintaining Windows 2000 Peak Performance through Defragmentation: "Free Space Fragmentation A partially full disk contains unused space, known as free space. Ideally, this space would be available in a few contiguous portions of the disk." -Microsoft TechNet -Paul

Several months ago I blogged on the importance of defragmenting virtual servers. I was very pleased to see a recent article in Redmond Magazine discussing VMware, storage virtualization and defragmentation. The following is a choice quote from the article:

"Defragment the host's disks as often as possible. Members of the VMware community recommend doing so on a daily basis. With VMware's disk files often consuming gigabytes of space for a single file, even a little fragmentation can significantly impact performance."

More and more people are recognizing the need for daily defragmentation in today's storage environment. A daily schedule keeps defrag jobs short and handles fragmentation as it occurs. Have you defragged today? -Paul

Due to the demand we have seen for 64 bit support in our advanced editions, we have now added 64 bit support to Diskeeper Professional Edition. Currently all of our editions (with the exception of Diskeeper Home) support 64 bit computing. Enjoy the extra 32 bits! -Paul

This is the best version we've ever done by a longshot. Almost everything in Diskeeper 10 has been improved. The first thing users will notice is an improved user interface which is easier to use and provides even more robust reports on disk health, real-time performance and fragmentation statistics. In Diskeeper 10, we're also announcing I-FAAST (Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology), the first successful implementation of Disk Performance Calibration technology. I-FAAST will improve file access times for frequently used files by an average of 10-20% (but sometimes by as much as 80%). Keep in mind this boost is in addition to defragmenting files! Diskeeper 10 really has been designed for today's enrivonment of spiraling storage device capacity. Diskeeper handles bigger drives and bigger files - faster than ever before. Diskeeper 10 also more thoroughly defragments free space and works better in low free space environments. Users will also find that we've made Diskeeper 10 even less intrusive. In version 10 we have improved I/O Smart, which allows Diskeeper to defragment in the "spaces" between normal disk I/O requests. -Paul

Once and a while I'm asked for independent studies on the performance effects of disk fragmentation. There are some excellent studies out there. Diskeeper Corporation recently sponsored a paper done by Windows IT Pro. Their writer, Joe Kinsella, actually developed his own test tools in order to do a very thorough fragmentation performance study: http://www.windowsitpro.com/whitepapers/index.cfm?fuseaction=showwp&wpid=4D2B047D-E1F8-4F20-A74DB68E7521E730&code= Besides the recent study we sponsored, there are a bunch of other independent studies in existence. A quick Google search yields a Harvard University study on UNIX: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/research/tr94.html I was unable to find a university study on Windows. I imagine Universities are probably less interested in studying the effects of fragmentation on FAT and NTFS, because it's generally considered common knowledge that file fragmentation hurts their performance. Once in a while a media source does in-depth fragmentation testing as part of a review, such as this PC Mag article: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1591466,00.asp The non-profit organization National Software Test Lab (NSTL) has also done performance tests on fragmentation: http://www.softwareshelf.com/HTML/products/prod_materials/5/NSTLXP_mddvdk.pdf - Paul

Server virtualization is expected to be one of the more disruptive technologies on the horizon. For those that don't know, server virtualization refers to running multiple instances of server OS'es on a single hardware platform. For instance a company could use server virtualization software, such as MS Virtual Server 2005 or VMware, to run virtual instances of both their file and database servers on a single hardware platform. Why would you do this? So you can better match your service needs to the available hardware, possibly reducing the number of servers you employ.

Diskeeper works safely and effectively with email servers, whether they are Microsoft, Exchange, Lotus, Domino, QUALCOMM, Eudora, or others. Diskeeper is uniquely designed to run in the background while these applications are operational and available to users. There is no need to stop or shutdown these applications or services to defragment. There are two types of volume-centric fragmentation with which Diskeeper is immediately concerned: file fragmentation and free space fragmentation. File fragmentation concerns computer files that are not contiguous, but rather are broken into scattered parts. Free space fragmentation describes a condition in which unused space on a disk is scattered into many small parts rather than a small number of larger spaces. File fragmentation causes problems with accessing data stored in computer files, while free space fragmentation causes problems creating new data files or extending (adding to) old ones.