Disk Fragmentation

Topic

New Reply

I am fighting a losing battle trying to convince my boss to take disk fragmentation seriously and having little luck finding any good third party documentation of the problems it causes and the benefits of regular defragmentation. Basically, I want to make a convincing argument for buying DiskKeeper, as the set-and-forget feature seems ideal for a mulitple server environment. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I would also welcome any other suggestions for a network solution.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Patrick–

If I were you, I’d try to sell the boss by taking advantage of the free trail versions for 30 days of Diskeeper and Perfect Disk which both can do an excellent job with networks and have enterprise solutions. We just had a defrag chat here in this lounge section and we have several people who have switched from Diskeeper to Pefect Disk and think it’s the best. Diskeeper has been a standard for years. I know a lot of people who swear by it, but they may not have tried Perfect Disk lately yet– myself included. Speed and completeness is one thing the Perfect Disk camp highlights, so I’d really give them both a workout on your machines.

As to literature to convince you of the value of defragging their are 314848 and 283080 and there is very compelling help for your argument at Diskeeper Support. Most of the NT articles apply through Windows XP defrag–and there is plenty in that yellow task pane in those links and Raxco’s Perfect Disk Support to make your argument. The best is to download whichever of their solutions–they have charts to guide you and run them on machines at work and show the boss before and after.

SMBP

Reply | Quote

Thanks for the documentation links, especially 283080. Since we have all XP clients, that will really come in handy. The changes for XP negate a lot of the Executive Software arguments for having DiskKeeper on the workstations.

Reply | Quote

http://www.diskeeper.com/diskeeper/IDC-White-Paper.pdf%5B/url%5D may be a good place to start – although I can not vouch for the ‘3rd-partyness’ of IDC!

What kind of network? – I believe our Diskeeper Server version can instigate defrags remotely (but I’ve never bothered, depending on the set-it-and-forget-it feature).

Reply | Quote

Having learnt from SMBP that XP clients can run the Windows defragmenter from the command line, I am not too worried about using the server remote management functions or installing anything additional on the workstations. It’s simple enough for me to schedule the built in installer remotely. The question is, do I have to buy the a special server version (which is probably bundled with workstation licences) on the servers, which are the machines that really need the regular maintenance.

Reply | Quote

Yes – you do need a specific server version for Diskeeper, but it does control the network installations.

Reply | Quote

Forgot – AD network, 13 Win2k servers, 60-odd clients.

I only really need to cover the servers, but I guess that DiskKeeper will want me to buy 3 5-server, 20-user volume licences. Don’t think I’m going to be able to justify that, just to make my life easier, when the workstations can be taken care of for just a couple of hours effort. I need to find somenhing that installs on a server or has a stand-alone server licence.

Reply | Quote

As far as I can see, the Server and Workstation licences are handled separately and individually – see http://esales.element5.com/execsw/Diskeeper_CORP_GBP.htm%5B/url%5D

Reply | Quote

Leif, I believe there was a patch to allow Diskeeper to run on a server as long as you were not controlling any workstations just defragging the server. Not sure that it works with the most current version. I’d contact Diskeeper support for the scoop.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

I see you’ve had plenty of pointers to docco to help with your argument.

Another tack, that has worked for me in the past in similar situations, is a demo. Managers can be sceptical of techie arguments, especially if they suspect they’re being “snowed” just so someone can get a new toy. In your situation you would probably need to use some benchmark tool to show what the performance is on a badly fragmented disk versus one that has been defragged. You may also need to go the extra step to translate the improvement from “60% to 90%” (or whatever) to a “real world” impact, like file access times, or response times on your network.

An extreme demo, would be to deliberately engineer extreme fragmentation to destroy performance. And then use the trial product to “save the day”. I’ve been tempted a few times, but so far have always managed to back off from such career challenging moves

Reply | Quote

Being still on my 3 month trial of a new job, I think I’ll avoid any potentially career threatening extreme measures!

The Server Administrator has a rather paranoid approach to defragmenting the servers, envisaging the scenario of something going catastrophically wrong in the defrag process and therer being no backup of everything for that day. When I suggested scheduling a defrag after the daily backup, he said, “But what if the backup failed? Would the defragmenter check to see that a successful backup had run before it ran?”

What can you say to that? Basically, the preferred solution (not by me!) is to have me manually defrag the servers. Not sure when this will happen, though, as the backups run after I’ve left and people start work long before I come in (10:00-10:30).

Anyway, thanks for all the input, folks.

Reply | Quote

Good thinking!

A couple of suggestions:

First, to add to your server admin’s paranoia, ask him “What will you do if fragmentation degrades performance to such a level that data access slows to a crawl?”, and “What if there’s a catastrophic failure just before, or during the backup?”. Then you can “RAID” in his shell-like.

Second, you should be able to safely schedule a defrag after the backup so you won’t lose any beauty . To ease your server admin’s paranoia, you will need to include a check for a successful backup before the defrag runs. The check could be for the presence of a current backup or log file, or similar clue. Such a check can be done several ways, including a DOS batch file, or an AutoIt script.

Reply | Quote

I think as Joe says, that if you call them at Exec Soft, they will quickly get you to someone who will try to tailor what you need at work and will link you or email you the correct information without making you go through hurdles to talk to them. If you call them and tell them your set up they’ll give you a quote can probably work out a tailored trial foryour server setup and you can work out what you need for servers and see how it stacks up.

SMBP

Reply | Quote