A key cause of I/O bottlenecks is fragmentation—the splitting of
files into pieces to better utilize drive space. It is not uncommon for a file to
be split into thousands or even tens of thousands of fragments—hence fragmentation
has been an issue for the entire history of modern computing.
Condusiv’s IntelliWrite® technology
optimizes I/O write operations, eliminating the performance penalties associated
with the Windows OS splitting files into pieces and writing each piece to a different
logical location within the SAN or NAS. IntelliWrite is aware of space allocation
and aggregates writes to behave sequentially—requiring less I/O for every file written.
Subsequent reads also benefit, since only minimum I/O is required to fulfill the
request. As a result, only productive I/O requests are processed across the entire
infrastructure, enabling more data to be processed in the same amount of time. When
only productive I/O traffic is processed through the server, network and storage,
I/Os per second are accelerated, latency is greatly reduced, and more work can be
performed in the same amount of time. This greatly improves the efficiency of physical
servers for increased bandwidth.
IntelliWrite prevents the Windows OS from storing files as disjointed block sets
in its logical block space representation of a logical storage volume. In a virtualized
environment, the problem of excessive, unnecessary I/O is compounded as multiple
VMs share the same storage resource, resulting in highly random I/O behavior pushed
down to the disk subsystem. To solve this, IntelliWrite adds intelligence to the
way the Windows OS preallocates file space in order to continuously restructure
writes in a coherent manner, store files as contiguous sets of blocks, and prevent
performance penalties.
Preventing I/O Bottlenecks
IntelliWrite can be used
in conjunction with other software products for improved performance of a wide variety
of applications: security applications, encryption, backups, and many more. The
benefits accrue to an entire system, with substantial savings in resources and even
energy consumption. IntelliWrite’s performance gains are well above those of automatic
defragmentation alone, yet can be run in conjunction with automatic defragmentation
(highly recommended for ideal performance) or independently.
In cases of high-traffic systems on which there are limited times for scheduling
or even background defragmentation, improvements are especially notable; in some
such cases IntelliWrite may be the only effective measure taken for fragmentation.
Both NTFS and FAT file systems on Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, XP, Windows Home Server,
Windows Server 2008 including 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2003 are supported. IntelliWrite
is completely compatible with hard disks (HDD) and solid-state disks (SSDs) as well
as SAN storage solutions.
Contact OEM sales for more information on IntelliWrite
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