Reducing Backup Times Via Defrag

Data files could be considered the lifeblood of an organization as they are essential to its operation. Delays or failures of data backups expose this essential lifeblood to potential loss causing the maximizing of backup speed to rank high on most IT manager priority lists. An effective, thorough defrag solution is a first step in meeting that priority.

IT professionals understand the value of a professional grade defragmentation solution. Fragmentation wreaks havoc on even the most powerful servers and often become so severe that backups cannot complete in time. Since the backup process involves file access, fragmentation severely impacts backup speed and effectiveness and negatively impacts overall server speed and performance.

Diskeeper 2011 data performance software from Diskeeper Corp. resolves this problem by using various innovations that not only accelerate the defrag process but enhance its efficiency. With IntelliWrite fragmentation prevention technology enabling the system to write files contiguously in the first place, most fragmentation is prevented before it happens. Residual fragmentation is addressed with Instant Defrag, leaving virtually no fragmentation to hinder routine procedures, substantially reducing the time it takes to perform routine backups.

Steven Orsi, Lead IT Specialist, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, reports: "Diskeeper improves the performance of backups: they complete faster and there are fewer failures. Also it is faster to restore data from a backup if the data is not fragmented. Diskeeper also improves the performance of overall disk access for large disk volumes."

With continued expansion of organizational storage requirements, the time required for file-based data backup also increases yet the time allotted for backup usually remains constant, fostering a critical issue. Backup software vendors continue making advancements in technology to speed up the process, but disk fragmentation must be addressed at the file system level to solve this bottleneck and realize those advancements.

"It used to take 25 hours to perform our weekly backup. By using Diskeeper, we were able to reduce it to 9 hours," observed Jimmy Beltran, Lotus Notes Administrator, Sandvik SIT Americas. "By enabling automatic defragmentation, we increased the performance of the drive array on live production systems with no user impact other than an increase in performance."