Condusiv Diskeeper 15 Server Software for SAN Storage Optimization

Condusiv Technologies Corp. announced Diskeeper 15 Server, highlighting a fragmentation prevention solution for SAN storage systems connected to physical servers to keep both servers and storage running like new.

“Even with over 45 million Diskeeper licenses sold, Condusiv is not sitting still in regard to addressing performance-robbing fragmentation wherever it appears in the data center. Performance-robbing file fragmentation affects SAN storage equally as much as it affects server local storage or DAS. As much as Condusiv offers a robust software solution to accelerate virtual environments, the fact remains that some of the most mission-critical applications still run on physical servers. That’s not a small number considering there are over five million physical servers in production across North America and EMEA,” said Brian Morin, SVP, global marketing, Condusiv.

While RAID controllers do a good job of managing data at the physical disk layer, which certainly helps in the fight against file fragmentation, it falls short in that it does nothing about fragmentation at the logical software layer that Windows sees. This is the primary reason SAN storage performance degrades over time.

“There is a misconception among storage administrators that their SAN storage device is eradicating fragmentation for them because they aren’t familiar with fragmentation at the logical disk layer outside the SAN. While SAN technologies certainly help at the physical disk layer, it does nothing to address fragmentation at the logical disk layer. If Windows sees a file existing as 20 separate pieces at the logical layer, that means the physical server and SAN storage device will execute 20 separate I/O operations to process the file. That’s a lot of overhead to the physical server and a lot of unnecessary IO/s to the SAN considering it would have taken just one or two I/O operations to move the same amount of data if Diskeeper 15 Server was being used to prevent fragmentation at the logical disk layer,” said Morin.

According to Steve Taylor, CTO, Plan B Technologies in Bowie MD, “Considering that fragmentation dampens the performance of mission-critical applications by 25% or more, Diskeeper 15 Server’s list price of $399.95 per server makes it a ‘no-brainer’ for our customer base. If storage administrators want to keep their SAN storage systems running like new, they need to work with their in-house Windows server administrator to deploy Diskeeper 15 Server across the physical server environment to prevent fragmentation from occurring at the logical disk layer. This provides benefits at both the compute and storage layers since less overhead is required to process any given file.“

Diskeeper 15 Server’s real-time fragmentation prevention software operates at the physical server layer where input/output (I/O) operations originate. By preventing files from being fractured and broken apart into pieces before being written to disk or SSD in a non-sequential manner, fragmentation is eliminated before it becomes an issue. That means a SAN storage system never needs to be taken offline for defragmentation maintenance.

“Not only does Diskeeper Server introduce a new era of performance optimization to SAN storage using HDD drives, but also SSDs as well. Fragmentation at the logical disk layer is inherent to the fabric of Windows despite the storage media on the backend. Organizations are making heavy CapEx investments into flash but not getting most from that investment due to the I/O overhead occurring at the file system layer. Diskeeper 15 Server changes that equation for them,” said Morin.

Diskeeper 15 Server:

• IntelliWrite 2.0 has been enhanced to prevent fragmentation from occurring so files are written in an optimal sequential state for servers with local storage, DAS, and SAN.

• InvisiTasking 2.0 intelligent resource monitoring technology has been enhanced to allow Diskeeper ‘background’ operations to run with near-zero resource impact on current activities.

• Instant Defrag 2.0 has been enhanced to monitor volumes to resolve critically fragmented files in real-time that are known to cause performance problems, making it SAN-friendly.