Server Solutions

The life of any company flows through its Email servers. Email servers like Exchange Servers take a beating from the sheer volume of communication that is essential to company activity. When email files are written to disk, files are broken into smaller and smaller fragments and scattered around the hard drive.

Available free space becomes more fragmented, increasing the effort of the hard disk controller arm to write or read data. As this occurs, the number of I/Os necessary to perform a single task grow exponentially. I/O bottlenecks grow quickly and help desk calls escalate.

Eventually the server has to be taken down and defragmented manually. There are several problems here. Decreased business productivity, increased help desk calls, increased wear on storage media and increased energy consumption. All of them come from unoptimized file I/O.

Read about Diskeeper for improved email server performance »

How can I improve my Email Server performance?

The first thing is to realize that resource waste begins right at the O/S level when files are written in fragments to the disk. Because this is such a rock-bottom level of the IT stack, the repercussions can be wide ranging and hard to source. Many system administrators think things like declining system response and rapidly filling disk space are simply part of the cost of doing business. But if file fragmentation is corrected or prevented before it can happen, many system issues disappear and storage space is used more effectively.

Exchange Servers are one of the first server types to be virtualized. Virtual Machines running on Windows NTFS file systems inherit all the fragmentation of a logical drive on a physical disk. Some administrators mistakenly think their SAN environments are immune to fragmentation, but the truth is, a fragmented NTFS sends millions of unnecessary I/Os down to the SAN layer, forcing it to work harder.

Diskeeper^® data performance software prevents most of the writing of files in pieces to the disk and does so invisibly. What little gets by is instantly optimized before it can affect productivity or cause a proliferation of unnecessary I/Os. V-locity^® VM accelerator does the same with VMs. Both solutions are highly resource aware and ensure optimization activity never creates resource conflicts.

"Email is not the lifeblood of the company, but you wouldn’t know it by the way people want their mail quickly. Some people think that email is instantaneous! With all of the file activity, the system was dragging. If we got hit with a SPAM storm we could backlog to where messages were lost. Adding Diskeeper has made those issues all but memories."

- Charles Roberson, Information Services Manager
Placid Refining Company LLC

"Before we started using Diskeeper on our Exchange cluster, the email system suffered from freeze ups and major database corruption issues. Since instituting Diskeeper, the freeze ups are history and the database corruption has not recurred. The complaints about the email system, which were frequent, are now almost non-existent"

- Gretchen Gantzer, Network Admin
Canoga Perkins

Download a free trial of Diskeeper Server or V-locity to improve your email server performance today »