Paragon and Insight Integrated Systems Partner

Paragon Software Group partnered with Insight Integrated Systems (IIS), a division of Insight Investments LLC, in technology solutions and financing options, to provide the Paragon Alignment Tool (PAT) to companies suffering from disk drive partition misalignment.

Insight Integrated Systems will also offer Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager (HDM) 11 Server for disaster recovery and as a tool for system migration and virtualization projects.

With the transition from the 512-byte to the 4k-byte sector storage standard, many drives are experiencing performance degradation between 20 and 40 percent due to partition misalignment. Misalignment can appear under a number of different scenarios. For companies utilizing virtual environments, performance problems are amplified.

"As a leading IT services companies in the U.S., we are in the trenches working side-by-side with our clients and as a result, we are at the forefront for offering only the best software solutions for our customers," said Rob Flannery, SVP of National Sales "We decided to partner with Paragon because we found their service and products to be top-notch and at an attractive price for our clients."

"We see many companies struggle with alignment issues," said Daniel Eickhoff, director of channel sales at Paragon Software Group. "The performance issues are critical, but IT managers are often unfamiliar with the problem of misalignment and unsure about the best course of action to resolve the issue with minimal impact on their organization – our software simplifies the alignment process to get their servers humming at full speed again as quickly as possible."

"We are proud to be partnering with Insight Integrated Systems to provide their customers with affordable and proven solutions," said Eickhoff.

Who May Be Affected by Partition Misalignment? Computer systems within companies are being affected by partition misalignment; whether running one virtual server or 1,000 – if virtual disks are misaligned, applications, databases, etc. are running at sub-optimal performance. Almost every storage device, storage system architecture and application is vulnerable to partition misalignment, including Advanced format (AF) hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs) Database applications, storage virtualization environments, RAID and other distributed data architectures Problems with misalignment increase as the number of storage devices in the network increases.

Misalignment of the logical partition sectors and actual physical sectors leads to redundant read/write operations, which results in a critical decrease in I/O performance and drive longevity. With the Paragon Alignment Tool (PAT) Enterprise Edition, you can align your drive to eliminate these problems. Other available editions are: PAT ESX, PAT Scriptable Staging Edition and PAT NetApp Edition.

HDM 11 Server provides a backup and disaster recovery software solution for physical and virtual environments. The product offers the ability to perform instant system recovery and bare-metal restores to dissimilar hardware. HDM includes 4K-aware migration and virtualization utilities, as well as advanced partitioning and data wiping tools.