Condusiv: Software Enhancements to Eliminate Downtime Risks and Double Meditech EHR Performance

Condusiv Technologies Corporation announced enhancements to its I/O reduction software that over 100 Meditech hospitals and thousands of businesses rely on.

These enhancements will more aggressively eliminate the reliability and performance-robbing effects of File Attribute List (FAL) growth and NTFS file fragmentation that negatively impact applications such as the Meditech EHR application, SQL databases and Exchange server databases. These enhancements are available in V-locity 7.0 and Diskeeper 18.

The Meditech EHR application can experience extensive fragmentation that lends itself to two problems (1) Sluggish EHR performance (2) risk of application failure or critical downtime as soon as the FAL reaches its size limit, a Windows file system limitation. As such, Meditech requires users to have a fragmentation remediation plan.

“Condusiv’s fragmentation prevention and DRAM caching software contains an additional technology called MediWrite that optimizes behavior specific to the Meditech platform. MediWrite monitors files for extreme cases of NTFS file fragmentation that can severely impact server and storage performance once the FAL reaches its maximum size limit and causes unnecessary downtime to resolve. MediWrite takes special action on these files to proactively prevent these extreme cases of fragmentation from occurring in the first place,” said Gary Quan, SVP, product strategy.

He continued: “MediWrite is unique from all other defragmenters in handling the FAL fragmentation. Because of restrictions in the Windows file system, all other defragmenters can actually make the FAL size grow when they defragment a file. Condusiv’s unique MediWrite technology can defragment these cases without growing the FAL size, the only defragmenter to do this, which is why we are the recommended solution.“

Mike Belkner, associate VP technology, Meditech (Medical Information Technology, Inc.), stated: “Meditech endorses Condusiv’s I/O reduction software, V-locity and Diskeeper, for their ability to reduce disk fragmentation and eliminate File Attribute List (FAL) saturation. Because of their design and feature set, we have also observed they accelerate application performance in a measurable way. Meditech requires a defragmentation program for all 5x and 6x customers. We are pleased that Condusiv has continued to enhance their solution and their products are strongly recommended.“

The company’s MediWrite feature is in both V-locity (for virtual servers) and Diskeeper Server (for physical servers) and is a technology that should be used since it can defragment the FAL without causing FAL size growth. Moreover, by resolving any existing fragmentation and preventing any new fragmentation from occurring in real-time, performance penalties and downtime risks are resolved. MedWrite also has the option to automatically alert users when a FAL size issue is detected, so it can be resolved immediately.

Enhancements to reduce downtime and improve application performance:

• Free Space Consolidation engine automatically eliminates the massive amounts of free space fragmentation that can occur on Meditech systems due to millions of temporary files that get created and deleted. This helps prevent the data fragmentation that causes the FAL issue from occurring.

• Advanced File Attribute List (FAL) defragmentation that dynamically detects FAL size issues and uses more aggressive defragmentation methods when needed to keep FAL levels under control. Downtime risk from FAL growth is eliminated.

• Fine-tuned optimization methods create more efficient use of unused/available system resources.

The company’s I/O Reduction software solutions are available for Windows Servers and PCs.

The company offers following performance enhancing solutions:

• V-locity 7.0 for virtual servers (on premises or in the cloud) guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges on I/O intensive systems like MS-SQL databases, EHR applications and Exchange servers.

• Diskeeper 18 Server for physical servers guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges on I/O intensive systems like MS-SQL databases, EHR applications and Exchange servers.

• Diskeeper 18 Professional enhances the performance of HDD-based corporate laptops and desktops by delivering ‘faster than new’ performance.

• SSDkeeper 2.0 enhances the performance of SSD-based corporate laptops and desktops by delivering ‘faster than new’ performance.

• Options include a centralized management console to manage hundreds or thousands of systems via the V-locity management console or Diskeeper administrator.

Key features:

• Patented IntelliWrite technology eliminates the severe inefficiency in the hand-off of data between the Windows OS and underlying storage system that results in a surplus of excessively small, fractured writes and reads that dampen the performance of all-flash and hybrid SAN, NAS, hyperconverged, and cloud storage. By preventing files from being fractured and broken apart into smaller pieces (with each piece requiring its own I/O operation before being written to disk or SSD in a non-sequential manner), IntelliWrite ensures large, clean contiguous writes and reads for maximum payload with every I/O operation.

• Patented IntelliMemory caching technology establishes a tier-0 cache strategy by serving hot reads from memory that is otherwise idle or available. Nothing has to be allocated for cache since IntelliMemory is aware moment-by-month of how much memory is unused and only uses that portion to serve hot reads. If a system is ever memory constrained at any time, the caching engine backs off entirely, so administrators never need to be concerned about memory contention. However, with as little as 2-4GB of available memory, IntelliMemory drives gains by offloading 50% or more read traffic from storage.

• Patented InvisiTasking intelligent monitoring technology enables Condusiv’s thin filter drivers to operate quietly in the background with near-zero overhead by only using CPU cycles that are otherwise free and idle. This ensures any optimizations to the system by the company’s software have occurred without intrusion on current activities. If applications or processes ask for CPU cycles, the firm’s software backs off as it runs at lowest priority.

• The Offline FAL Remediation utility that provides the capability to quickly shrink the FAL-IN-USE size of data files in minutes. Without this utility, the only other method is to perform a logical copy of the file to another volume, then back. This has to occur while the volume is offline and for large data files, this could take hours rather than the minutes it takes this utility.

“As much as Condusiv I/O reduction software has been a real benefit to our applications running across 2,500+ Windows servers, we are happy to see a no reboot version of the software released so it is now truly ‘Set It & Forget It.’ My team is happy they no longer have to wrestle down a reboot window for hundreds of servers in order to update or deploy Condusiv software,” said Blake W. Smith, MSME system director, enterprise infrastructure, Christus Health.

Software availability with this enhancements is early November 2018.