On contemplating the impact of his calculating engine, the world’s first computer, Charles Babbage wrote “In turning from the smaller instruments in frequent use to the larger and more important machines, the economy arising from the increase of velocity becomes more striking.” He said that in 1832.

I mention this because the idea holds true today—the bigness of everything, the immediacy of everything, the pace of everything—the greater the increase from one state to another, the more striking the difference. And that’s exactly why—when we put V-locity 4 trialware into the hands of virtualization wizards to test in their lairs—we want them to really, really put it through the wringer. The heavier the workload, the greater the application demand, the more striking the results.

Recently two virtualization pros got their hands on the V-locity 4 30-day trial, set up rigorous testing, and blogged the entire experience:

VMware technical architect amazed by V-locity 4 results

Another virtualization blogger amazed by V-locity 4

Today we are very excited to announce the release of V-locity 4 VM Accelerator. With this latest release, V-locity increases VM and application performance by up to 50% and does so without any additional storage hardware.

Let’s face it - in today’s world of virtual environments, we generate a tremendous amount of data and it’s only the beginning. In fact, findings included in a recent study by IDC titled “Extracting Value from Chaos” predict that in the next ten years we will create 50 times more information and 75 times more files.

The impact of this data explosion on server virtualization can often lead to I/O bottlenecks. This is because a physical server running multiple virtual machines (VMs) must often carry out far more I/O operations than one server running a single workload, and typical virtualization environments emulate I/O devices that run less efficiently than native I/O devices.

In essence, virtualization acts like a funnel, combining and mixing many disparate I/O streams, sending out to the disk what becomes a very random I/O pattern. To make matters worse, the more VMs are added, the more the issue is compounded as more I/O is "randomized." All of this has a very negative affect on storage performance, and renders time-honored techniques such as read-ahead buffers and caching algorithms far less effective than in conventional physical environments.

Storage I/O is the most critical issue in a virtualized environment, and can cause organizations to spend a great deal on storage, purchasing more and more disk spindles, but often using only a fraction of their capacity because of performance issues. The outcome is that, due to issues relating to performance bottlenecks in the storage infrastructure, some applications are deemed unable to be virtualized; however, a properly tuned storage environment might have accommodated those applications. So what’s the alternative? The answer is V-locity 4 VM Accelerator. 

V-locity 4 VM Accelerator provides:

·         Increased application performance up to 50%

·         Up to 50% faster access to frequently accessed files

·         Faster I/O performance without the cost of additional storage hardware

·         Increased VM density per physical server up to 50%

·         Extended hardware lifespan by eliminating unnecessary I/Os

·         Automatic and real-time operation for true “Set It and Forget It®” management 

What makes V-locity 4 so effective is its powerful toolkit of proactive technologies, including IntelliWrite,® V-Aware,® CogniSAN,® InvisiTasking® and the new IntelliMemory® RAM caching technology.

New! IntelliMemory™ Caching Technology
IntelliMemory intelligent caching technology boosts active data, improving I/O response time up to 50% or more while also eliminating unnecessary I/O operations from getting into the network or storage.

Improved! IntelliWrite® Technology
IntelliWrite automatically prevents the operating system from breaking files into pieces and writing those pieces in a performance penalized manner. This proactive approach improves performance up to 50% or more while preventing any negative impact to snapshots replication, data deduplication or thin provisioning growth. As this proactive approach happens at the server level, the network and shared storage simply has less I/O operations to transfer and process.

New! Performance Benefit Analyzer
The Performance Benefits Analyzer helps document the performance benefits of V-locity. The benefit analyzer looks at your current system performance, then compares these results to those after using V-locity to provide a detailed report showing specific improvements and benefits to your system.

V-Aware® Technology
V-Aware detects external resource usage from other virtual machines on the virtual platform and eliminates resource contention that might slow performance.

CogniSAN® Technology
CogniSAN detects external resource usage within a shared storage system, such as a SAN, and allows for transparent optimization by not competing for resources utilized by other VMs over the same storage infrastructure. And it does this without intruding in any way into SAN-layer operations.

InvisiTasking® Technology
InvisiTaksing allows all the V-locity 4 "background" operations within the VM to run with zero resource impact on current production.

Set It and Forget It®
Automatic and real-time operation.

For more details and a FREE trial, visit www.condusiv.com/products/v-locity or call a sales representative at 1-800-829-6468.

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.

Today we announce the worldwide release of Undelete 10 – our real-time data protection and instant data recovery product. With just a touch of a button, Undelete instantly recovers files from Windows servers and workstations – even files that were deleted before Undelete was installed.

Enterprise IT and data have grown immensely since Condusiv first introduced Undelete over 14 years ago. Regardless of the Windows OS you’re running, whether it be a physical or virtual environment – Undelete is the one piece of software your company can’t afford to be without and can truly turn your IT department into a team of heroes.

“I came by Undelete when we had a user delete a whole department worth of files”, says Eric Tremelling, who’s the IT Manager at The Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County. “It did recover all the files for the whole department.  I was so impressed that I purchased the Undelete Server edition to avoid future problems.  In my opinion, Undelete is one of the best programs we have and saves me lots of potential headaches.” 

“We use a backup system that does nightly backups to tape.  If something is deleted from the file server by mistake I have to go back to the tapes then pull the correct tape then run a restore on the file, provided there was no corruption or problems with the backup tape.  Another issue was that the deleted file could be gone before anyone noticed it was missing and I may not still have a backup that old to recover from.  Furthermore, if the file was created during the day before the backup runs at night, it would be gone because it never got backed up yet. The software has gotten us out of many jams”

Have an Undelete story to share? Leave a comment below – we’d love to hear from you!

Undelete 10 features

• New One-button Search for Recent Files, which allows the user to locate a file deleted within a 24-hour period or one week period with one click.
   
• New Search Wizard, a single pane view that provides fast and easy way to find a lost file.
   
• New Dynamic User Interface for ease of use, quality of experience.
   
• Undelete 10 Server - Protects server files including those deleted by network clients from a centralized management console.
   
• Undelete 10 Desktop Client – Allows connected laptops, workstations and VMs to recover their own files from remote Undelete 10 Server recovery bins.
   
• Undelete 10 Professional – Protects locally stored files and allows files to be recovered from remote Undelete Server recovery bins.
   
• Undelete 10 Home – Provides comprehensive protection of locally stored files.

When a file is deleted, it is automatically captured and stored in the Undelete Recovery Bin. Undelete 10 captures all the files the Windows Recycle Bin misses, such as those deleted from shared network folders, deleted from commonly used applications, deleted by the Windows command prompt, or replaced when newer versions of a file are saved. Also, if a file is modified several times between a backup or shadow copy, it will not be saved. With Undelete, these file versions will be saved and are recoverable.

The Server, Professional and Client editions of Undelete let you see the contents of Recovery Bins on remote computers like file servers, allowing IT or users to recover their deleted files in seconds anywhere across the network with a single click of a button. It’s no longer necessary to spend hours searching backup tapes or Windows Shadow copies when a user accidentally deletes a file from the server.

Undelete can also restore files previously purged from the Recycle Bin or the Undelete Recovery Bin – even if they were deleted before Undelete was installed

Condusiv Undelete 10 “Set it and Forget It”^® file recovery system runs on all Windows platforms, including those on VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Undelete 10 also supports Exchange, SQL, or SharePoint. 

Undelete 10 Server edition supports Windows Server 2008/2008 R2, Windows Server 2003,  Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Undelete 10 Client, Professional and Home Editions support Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

In compliance with corporate governance or governmental regulatory requirements for secure data deletion, Undelete provides an electronic data shedder: SecureDelete^® 2.0. Using a bit pattern specified by the National Security Agency (NSA) for the Department of Defense, SecureDelete not only deletes a file but overwrites the disk space the file previously occupied making it virtually impossible for anyone to access.

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.

Dear Diskeeper customers and friends,

Shortly after being appointed CEO of Diskeeper, in September 2011, I realized that I had inherited a very talented team with deep engineering expertise and a strong desire to develop thought-leading, high-performance software and products that would have extremely positive and measurable impact on our customers’ business.

We are a very different organization today than we were when the company was founded in 1981. Adopting a new name and brand identity is the logical next step in our growth strategy. As a result, we will cease operating under the name Diskeeper Corporation on March 4, 2012.

Going forward, Diskeeper Corporation will be known as Condusiv Technologies. The name change follows 31 years of successful business, but with a new mission to connect customers and partners, technology and people with the benefits of optimized efficient growth, fast thinking and change.

Condusiv expresses what we have become as an organization as well as what we hope to be — a highly focused company that transcends the boundaries of traditional solutions with innovative products that dramatically improve productivity.

We also want to take this time to introduce Undelete®10, the new release of our real-time file-protection product with Instant Recovery. We will also be launching an aggressive global rebranding campaign to reinforce our mission and introduce our new brand to the public at large.

I want to thank you for your business and loyalty. Every one of us at Condusiv looks forward to doing all that we can do to help you and your business improve and succeed.

Sincerely,

Jerry Baldwin

CEO, Condusiv Technologies

IntelliWrite technology has been around for about two years now, optimizing literally millions of systems worldwide. It seamlessly integrates with Windows, delivering optimized writes upon initial I/O (no need for additional, after-the-fact file movement). What does that translate to? Actual fragmentation prevention.

Interestingly, we do occasionally get asked how it bears up against modern storage technologies:

“Don’t the latest SANs optimize themselves?”

“Do I really need this on my VMs? They aren’t physical hard drives, you realize…”

Or even…

“I don’t need to defragment my SAN-hosted VMs.”

Now, there are some factors which must be considered when you’re looking at optimizing I/O in your infrastructure:

• I/O from Windows is just abstracted Reads and Writes from a higher layer, even directly over a bare metal disk.
• Due to the way current Windows file systems are structured, I/O can be greatly constrained by file fragmentation—no matter what storage lies underneath it.
• Fragmentation in Windows means more I/O requests from Windows—even if files are stored perfectly contiguously at the SAN level, Windows still has to send X amount of requests because of the fragmentation that it sees within its top level.
• File fragmentation is not the same as block-level (read: SAN-level) fragmentation. Many SAN utilities resolve issues of block-level fragmentation admirably; these do not address file fragmentation.
• Finally, and as noted above, IntelliWrite prevents fragmentation in real time by improving Windows “Best Fit” file write logic. This means solving file fragmentation issues with no additional writes which could create issues with SAN de-dup or various copy-on-write data redundancy measures.

We performed testing with a customer recently in order to validate the benefits of IntelliWrite over cutting-edge storage. This customer’s SAN array is less than a year old, and while we don’t want to go into specifics in order to avoid seeming partial, it’s from one of today’s leading SAN vendors.

Testing involved apples to apples comparison on a production VM hosted over the SAN. A non-random workload was generated 3 times, recording Windows-level file fragmentation, several PerfMon metrics, and time to complete the workload. The test was then repeated 3 times, now with IntelliWrite enabled on the same VM’s test volume.

Here were the results:

Diskeeper Corporation is pleased to announce that we have recently entered into a worldwide, exclusive agreement with SanDisk. SanDisk will license Diskeeper's industry-leading caching software solutions for solid state disk drives (SSDs). SanDisk will provide these solutions both as standalone software products as well as bundled with SanDisk's SSD products for client computing applications.

Here's what Diskeeper's CEO had to say: "We see our alliance with SanDisk as a critical driver to accelerate adoption of SSD computing applications. The exceptional performance and endurance of SanDisk's SSDs paired with Diskeeper's ExpressCache and NowOn products offer consumer OEM customers industry-leading performance optimization for Ultrabooks and other computer platforms."

Check out the full article from the NY Times here.

Diskeeper Corporation recently delivered a live webinar hosted by Ziff Davis Enterprise. The principle topics covered were:

• Measuring performance loss in Windows over SAN
• Identifying client-side performance bottlenecks in private clouds
• Expanding performance awareness to the client level
• The greatest and often-overlooked performance issue in a virtual ecosystem

The webinar was co-hosted by:

• Stephen Deming, Microsoft Partner Solution Advisor
• Damian Giannunzio, Diskeeper Corporation Field Sales & Application Engineer

Don't miss out on this critical data! If you missed the webinar, you can view the recorded version online here.

Here are some additional, relevant resources:

White Paper: Diskeeper 2011: Improving the Performance of SAN Storage

White Paper: Increasing Efficiency in the IT Environment

White Paper: Inside Diskeeper 2011 with IntelliWrite

White Paper: Running Diskeeper and V-locity on SAN Devices 

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

In today’s well connected world of electronics and instant communications I received a text from a friend asking if I had seen the recent PC World magazine (February, 2012).  He said it had some tidbit of information concerning one of my favorite subjects; system performance, defragmentation, and SSDs.  I located a copy here at the office and found the article. As I read the first line I realized the debate on the virtues of defragmentation especially on SSDs will be one that goes on indefinitely as no one really talks about the issue with supporting hard facts and numbers.  Most articles are rehashing ideas and opinions long since debunked.  They continue to surface because very few truly understand the intricacies of the Windows NTFS file system and that of the storage media, whether it is rotating magnetic hard disks or electronic solid state disks.

So let’s set the record straight… Fragmentation is exponentially more of a problem with today’s data explosion. Defragmenting once a week will still cause the user to experience slowdowns from the degradation effects and doesn’t address the issue when files are initially being written.  And yes, never do a traditional defrag on SSDs.

NTFS file and free space fragmentation happens far more frequently than you might guess.  It has the potential to happen as soon as you install the operating system.  It can happen when you install applications or system updates, access the internet, download and save photos, create e-mail, office documents, etc…  It is a normal occurrence and behavior of the computer system, but does have a negative effect on over all application and system performance.  As fragmentation happens the computer system and underlying storage is performing more work than necessary.  Each I/O request takes a measurable amount of time.  Even in SSD environments there is no such thing as an “instant” I/O request.  Any time an application requests to read or write data and that request is split into additional I/O requests it causes more work to be done.   This extra work causes a delay right at that very moment in time.  Whoever thought that defragmenting once a month or weekly was good enough, simply didn’t understand fragmentation.

Disk drives have gotten faster over the years, but so have CPUs.  In fact, the gap between the difference in speed between hard disks and CPU has actually widened.  This means that applications can get plenty of CPU cycles, but they are still starving to get the data from the storage.  What’s more, the amount of data that is being stored has increased dramatically.  Just think of all those digital photos taken and shared over the holidays.  Each photo use to be approximately 1MB in size, now they are exceeding 15MB per photo and some go way beyond that.  Video editing and rendering and storage of digital movies have also become quite popular and as a result applications are manipulating hundreds of Gigabytes of data.  With typical disk cluster sizes of 4k, a 15MB size file could potentially be fragmented into nearly 4,000 extents.  This means an extra 4,000 disk I/O requests are required to read or write the file.  No matter what type of storage, it will simply take longer to complete the operation.

Suppose I chose to do some editing of my family videos on Tuesday evening.  Even the built-in defragmentation tool in Windows 7 doesn’t do me much good because it isn’t schedule to run until Wednesday morning at 1:00am.  This also means that quite a bit of fragmentation has built up since the previous week when it last ran.  Maybe I’ll manually run it, but that can take quite a while and I’ve wasted time that I would have rather spent on my project.  Unfortunately, the Windows built-in defragmentation utility doesn’t prevent fragmentation so even after running it manually; I still will wind up with fragmentation and slow access speed of my newly created files. 

I’ve often thought about why Wednesday at 1:00am was chosen as the time to schedule defragmentation.  Why isn’t it scheduled all the time?   It is because there could be system resource conflicts that either interfere with getting the task done or the defragmentation process has difficulty throttling back under a variety of conditions.  Regardless, this wait a week to clean up fragmentation doesn’t really help me when I need it most.

As pointed out in the article, the built-in defragmenter does not have the technology advancement to properly deal with fragmentation and SSDs. The physical placement of data on an SSD doesn’t really matter like it does on regular magnetic HDDs.  With an SSD there is no rotational latency or seek time to contend with.  Many experts assume that fragmentation is no longer a problem, but the application data access speed isn’t just defined in those terms.  Each and every I/O request performed takes a measurable amount of time.  SSD’s are fast, but they are not instantaneous.  Windows NTFS file system does not behave any differently because the underlying storage is an SSD vs. HDD and therefore fragmentation still occurs.  Reducing the unnecessary I/O’s by preventing and eradicating the fragmentation reduces the number of I/O requests and as a result speeds up application data response time and improve the overall lifespan of the SSD.  In essence, this makes for more sequential I/O operations which is generally faster and outperforms random writes.

In addition, SSD’s require that old data be erased before new data is written over it, rather than just writing over the old information as with HDDs.  This doubles the wear and tear and can cause major issues with the speed performance and lifespan of the SSD.  Most SSD manufactures have very sophisticated wear-leveling technologies to help with this. The principle issue is write speed degradation due to free space fragmentation.  Small free spaces scattered across the SSD causes the NTFS file system to write a file in fragmented pieces to those small available free spaces.  This has the effect of causing more random I/O traffic that is slower than sequential operations.

I think I have clearly made my point….  The built-in defragmenter in Windows 7 is not a solution for neither the consumer/home user, nor the enterprise business user.  Data access speeds are far more critical in the business world where time is money.  In the enterprise environment there are generally many more files that are used by higher number of users that are accessing data across shared type of storage such as SAN.  Even virtual platforms benefit from the same points covered.  This opens the door and is the reason why robust solutions such as Diskeeper exist.  More data about Diskeeper and the superior technology it offers can be found at http://www.diskeeper.com.

I felt compelled to write a little bit about this subject after reading recently about some new updates to software SANs. The glamour of the virtual platform layers and Cloud have somewhat overshadowed all of the virtualization already occurring within storage, and the extra levels that are added “below decks”. It’s a topic meriting some scrutiny from any storage administrator committed to high performance.

Outside of the physical data store itself, every element of the I/O path above it is virtual. It should also be noted that at essentially each step along this I/O path, infrastructure customization and proprietary technologies can (and often do) vary or add new virtual layers to the process. All of these logical abstractions have evolved from various sources in the storage ecosystem in order to drive scalability and agile responses to disaster or growth.

Let’s consider a common hypothetical path that an I/O request takes from a Windows client VM to the physical data store in a modern infrastructure. In this example, the storage for the client VM is a virtual RAID 5 configured of LUNs from a SAN. An I/O request originating at the top OS level, Windows in this case, will go through these underlying levels before getting to the actual physical storage device. Windows > volume manager > virtual RAID > SAN LUN > physical store (with the possibility of additional abstraction levels based on storage customization).

Based upon how the storage infrastructure has been established in this scenario, there is a virtual RAID 5 implemented above the SAN LUN layer. That being the case, the volume manager directs the request to the virtual RAID beneath it. Due to Striping, I/O at this stage can end up fractured (intentionally) by the RAID, based on how the array has been provisioned. The I/O Path has now become distributed, and may be even further replicated on its way to physical storage.

The RAID sends its request to the SAN LUN below, another abstraction from the physical storage itself slicing the store into basic logical units. The SAN LUN layer completes the request directly to the physical storage. The data is then returned along the same route to the requester.

Now, numerous solutions exist for managing communication and throughput within this data pipeline. Administrators can tailor their RAID presentation, ensure partition alignment, upgrade the underlying hardware, even add new software abstraction layers intended to organize data better at lower levels. However, an interesting concept emerges after review.

None of these solutions handle the most basic, and one of the most critical vulnerabilities in the existing ecosystem’s performance: assuring that the file request is as sequential and rapid as possible at the point of origin. Whether virtualized as is so common today or installed over direct-attached storage, Windows Read and Write performance is degraded by file and free space fragmentation at this top level as it causes more I/O requests to occur. Each request through all of the abstraction layers greets its first bottleneck at the outset, in how contiguous the file arrangement is within Windows. Optimizing reads and writes at this upper level helps ensure in most cases the fastest I/O path no matter how much or how little storage abstraction has been structured beneath.

In a recent white paper, Diskeeper Corporation tested a variety of I/O metrics over SAN storage with and without file fragmentation being intelligently prevented and handled. In one such test, Iometer (an open source I/O measurement tool) displayed over a 200% improvement in IOPS (I/Os per second) after Diskeeper 2011 had handled Windows volume fragmentation. Testing was performed on a SAN connected to a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual host:

You can read the entire white paper here: http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/improve-san-performance.pdf 

Thin provisioning is a fairly hot topic in the storage arena, and with good reason. Many zones within the business and enterprise see massive benefit from the scalability of thin provisioning, and it can be a cost saver besides. However, the principle of thin provisioning suffers some unique maladies at both client and storage levels.

Some storage arrays include a feature permitting thin provisioning for their LUNs. This storage layer thin provisioning occurs below the virtual platform storage stack, and essentially means scalable datastores. Horizontal scaling of data stores adds a new tier of agility to the storage ecosystem that some businesses absolutely require.

LUN thin provisioning shouldn’t be confused with Virtual Disk TP, which works at a file level (not array). Thin provisioned VMs can expand based on pre-determined use cases, adding an extra degree of flexibility to storage density. Intelligently combining TP at multiple tiers yields some pretty neat capacity results.

Datastore thin provisioning has been the source of some concern for storage administrators with regards to recovery from over-provisioning. When virtual disks are deleted or copied away from a datastore, the array itself is not led to understand that those storage blocks are now free. You can see how this can lead to needless storage consumption.

vSphere 5 from VMware introduced a solution for this issue. The new vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) for TP uses the SCSI UNMAP command to tell the storage array that space previously occupied by a VM can be reclaimed. This addresses one aspect of the issue with thin VM growth.

Files are not simply being written to a virtual disk, they’re also deleted with regularity. Unfortunately, there is no associated feature within virtual platforms or Windows to inform the storage array that blocks can be recovered from a thin disk which should have contracted after deletions. Similar to the issue above, this leads to unnecessary storage waste.

With the release of V-locity 3 in 2011, we introduced a new Automatic Space Reclamation engine. This engine automatically zeroes out “dead” free space within thin virtual disks, without requiring that they be taken offline and with no impact on resource usage. So what does this mean? Thin VMs can be compacted, actually reclaiming the deleted space to the storage array for dynamic use elsewhere. The thin virtual disks themselves are kept slimmed down within datastores, giving more control back to the storage admins governing provisioning.

You can read more about VAAI for TP in vSphere 5 on the VMware blog here.

We’ve just returned from the Interop Expo in New York, and what a show! The recent release of V-locity® 3 was extremely well received and interest in its innovations was very high. The Diskeeper Corporation booth was constantly attended by groups of CIOs and storage administrators eager to hear about the benefits of the new virtual platform optimizer.

The lion’s share of energy and buzz at the show surrounded virtualization and cloud computing. Leading vendors across these markets as well as storage, networking, and information security exhibited for large groups of virtual admins and IT executives. Shows like Interop are critical for decision makers to stay apprised of the ever-evolving IT infrastructure landscape, and excellent opportunities to get educated about what is truly needed to grow and maintain a virtual environment that runs on all engines for them.

In addition to being asked by numerous IT analysts about the innovations underlying the incredible advantages of V-locity 3, I was interviewed by TMC (Technology Marketing Corporation) about it.

The need to meet higher Service Level Agreements and reduce Total Cost of Ownership for shared storage have reached a new plateau in virtualized networks and private clouds—what V-locity 3 does best.

If you’re reading this and you were at the event, we’d love to hear about your experiences at Interop this year.

Diskeeper Corporation will be exhibiting at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, FL next week. If you’re planning on attending this IT Expo, stop by the booth to hear firsthand about how V-locity 3 is improving virtual systems in a whole new way.

Here's what's new in V-locity 3.0.9 (update) which will be broadly available next week: 

1. Full support for all V-locity features on vSphere 5.0.

2. Support for V-locity Guest installation on VMs hosted on Citrix XenServer. All optimization technology and features present in the V-locity Guest software, such as V-Aware, CogniSAN, IntelliWrite, Space Reclamation, are supported. Note: The only missing feature on Citrix XenServer is the availability of a "Host Agent" (which automatically informs the V-locity Guest component about the virtual disk types - e.g. snapshot, sparse disk, etc...). This is planned for a future release. In the interim, manual configuration may be required.

3. Fixed a rare problem with V-locity service crashing when installed on a non-boot volume or when installed to a short path.

4. Fixed a problem with connection data disappearing from Host Agent.

5. Fixed an MMC crash when remote connecting to V-locity Guest while local UI already open.

6. Fixed a warning message when opening multiple Guest UI instances.

7. Fixed some UI issues that cut-off text for English, Japanese, German and French. 

8. Improved the Installation instructions to provide additional recommendations and information. 

Samsung (the provider of the Win8 tablets that were given away to all attendees) also did a demonstration of ExpressCache at the Microsoft BUILD conference last week.

Their booth, which was at the front of the EXPO, showed many machines with ExpressCache on them and also had a demo table set up with 3 machines.

o   System with a HDD only

o   System with SSD and HDD ExpressCache (8GB SSD)

o   System with SSD only (128GB SSD)

There was a button to push, on the counter top display, that started all of the notebooks up at the same time and then auto-launched an application. The ExpressCache system smoked the HDD notebook and was almost as fast at the large (128GB) SSD-only system. And, it offered a large capacity HDD as well.

The demo proved that, for a fraction of the price of buying a large SSD, you can get all the performance that SSDs offer with ExpressCache technology (and still store all your stuff).

IT professional and author, Justin James of TechRepublic published a top 10 list of ways to speed up your PC. Number 9 was one very familar to us:

"9: Defrag. Defragging your hard drives is a great way to get some more performance. While modern Windows systems automatically defrag on a regular basis, I’ve found that the Windows defragging is fairly unaggressive. We’ve reviewed a lot of different defrag apps here at TechRepublic. I suggest that you check out your alternatives and find one that does a better job for you."

Their findings mimic what we see with many of our business customer seeking to maximize Windows 7 performance. The built in defragmenter sounds like an attractive option at first, but closer inspection and testing clearly demonstrates significant value (better ROI) in advanced third party optimization technology. 

Read the whole article here: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-things-you-can-do-to-boost-pc-performance/2712?tag=nl.e101