"Spokane Regional Health District uses CommVault Simpana backup/archiving/disaster recovery software installed on a dedicated server with 37TB of SAS attached storage.

We perform daily full and incremental backups of all our servers. The data backup is disk-to-disk-to-tape and is deduplicated as it is saved on the SAS storage. The deduplication process can create a very large number of file fragments, sometimes over 1,540,000 fragments on a 2TB disk array. With Diskeeper EnterpriseServer automatic defrag running the response time of the arrays is approaching 0.02 second delay due to fragmentation. This has reduced our backup time by approximately 25 percent for any D2D2T job. 

SRHD also uses Microsoft Hyper-V and currently has 31 virtualized servers running on an Intel Modular Server. There are 72TB of storage available to the Modular Server via SAS connections featuring dual path IO. All of the data on the SAS arrays is maintained in RAID 60 logical disk drives. Since setting up V-locity, which has built-in support for VHD (virtual hard disks), with automatic defragmentation, our VHDs very seldom show any fragmentation. 

The solutions also have the intelligence to monitor disk IO and the defragmentation will pause to prevent IO latency affecting performance. They are set and forget applications which perform a very well without impact on our server response times."

-Larry Smith, Spokane Regional Health District