The Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) is a security configuration mandated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to standardize the configuration of desktop computers used by U.S. Government agencies. The Defragment software from Diskeeper has been tested to verify compliance with the FDCC under Windows XP and Windows Vista, using a SCAP validated tool with FDCC Scanner capability.

• Diskeeper 2010 is fully functional and operates correctly as intended on systems using the FDCC under Windows XP and Windows Vista.
• The standard installation, operation, maintenance, update of Diskeeper 2010 does not alter the configuration settings from the approved FDCC configuration. Diskeeper uses the Windows Installer Service for installation to the default "program files" directory and is able to silently install and uninstall.
• The Diskeeper 2010 performed correctly on a standard user level account in all functional areas on both operating systems.

You can contact your Public Sector Account Representative at Diskeeper Corporation with any questions about Diskeeper 2010 FDCC compliance.

Find out more about the FDCC here.

BURBANK, CA -- 07/20/10 -- Diskeeper Corporation has officially shipped V-locity™ 2.0, a new virtual platform disk optimizer designed to deliver invisible background optimization of all Windows® Guest operating systems running on the VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms. New to V-locity 2.0, is the addition of the breakthrough IntelliWrite™ fragmentation prevention technology originally introduced with Diskeeper 2010. Utilizing IntelliWrite technology, V-locity writes files to the disk to prevent up to 85 percent of fragmentation from occurring before it even happens.

Already a VMware and Microsoft partner for its Diskeeper® performance software, V-locity was made to create a virtual-specific product that not only performs defragmentation functions, but also synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems in a virtualized environment.

As virtualization platforms begin to age, fragmentation of files in Windows host and guest operating systems generates more disk I/O than should be necessary. Fragmentation creates more overhead on the OS and file system. While CPU, Network, and memory resources may allow for greater VM density, the disk subsystem can become a virtualization "high" hurdle.

"Fragmentation clogged disk subsystems can lead to an inability to run more VMs on given hardware infrastructure, and lead to disk performance bottlenecks for VMs that share a common storage subsystem," notes Diskeeper Product Manager, Michael Materie. "V-locity is designed to alleviate the 'virtual' disk bottleneck for VMs and provide a faster and more efficient computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives, without having to add more hardware."

"First of all, when building out my environment I make sure to have fast hard drives, controllers, etc., in order to make sure not to suffer bottlenecks. In addition, I am very careful about not over-committing resources. However, I was shocked to see, after deploying V-locity, how much performance increased on the servers I had hosting disk-intensive operations. This includes our database server, our Exchange server, and to a certain extent, two terminal servers," stated Bill Philpot Manager of Information Technology at Mesa Industries, Inc.

Diskeeper Corporation's proprietary technology, IntelliWrite writes files in a non-fragmented condition. Copy on write solutions (e.g. as used by Snapshots) take action on changes to data at a block level. Moving data, as is done in a defragmentation job to consolidate file fragments in a logical file system, can trigger copy on write solutions to take extra actions such as using more storage capacity, unnecessarily. Writing a file contiguously eliminates the need to defragment it after it has been created.

InvisiTasking® technology, another Diskeeper Corporation proprietary technology, is specifically engineered to allow "background" applications to operate with zero impact/overhead on a system. With V-locity 2, the InvisiTasking technology has been "enlightened" to operate across a virtual platform. Even as more VMs are added to a host platform or dynamically migrated to new hosts (e.g. vMotion, Live Migration), the enlightened InvisiTasking will continue to dynamically adjust to changing environments, providing V-locity 2.0 users with "Set It and Forget It" ® optimization of their virtual disk platforms.

V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating virtual disk "bloat." This is the wasted disk space that takes place when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don't then shrink when users or applications remove data. V-locity actually compacts the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT Managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

V-locity has four unique solution sets:

• InvisiTasking - coordinates resource usage to ensure defrag is 100% invisible
  
  
• IntelliWrite - prevent fragmentation and offer 100% compatibility in all environments
  
  
• Virtual Disk Intelligence - automatically detects and configures based on virtual disk type
  
  
• Virtual Disk Compaction - shrinks/compacts virtual disks that are set to grow-as-needed

V-locity consists of three components:

• V-locity Host installed in the VMware ESX Host or Windows Server 2008/R2 operating system running Hyper-V.
  
  
• V-locity Guest installed in all Windows virtual machines.
  
  
• For VMware ESX platforms: V-locity includes a small application that allows you to remotely connect from your Windows desktop to the V-locity Host component on an ESX system.

Note: On Windows platforms, each component will optimize its respective OS; performing defragmentation of files and consolidation of free space. This minimizes unnecessary I/O passed from the OS to the disk subsystem and aligns data on the drives for optimal access.

I came across a cool "how to" video today. It covers steps to keep a high-end rig running three SSDs in top form. The http://www.sirjamesd.com/ also happens to use HyperFast as part of his toolkit.

You can check it out here: http://www.30monitor.com/keeping-your-ssd-running-brilliant/

On another note, while the author is running Diskeeper Pro Premier, if you only have SSDs in your PC, save yourself some money and just get Diskeeper Home edition with HyperFast. The features in DK Professional and Pro Premier (I-FAAST and TVE) are only useful for HDD.

I'll cover more on I-FAAST and talk about TRIM and defrag in more detail in a follow up post. You can also see this post for some test data from a joint Microsoft/Diskeeper Corporation seminar.

 

Here's a cool succes about something many IT pro's wouldn't normally associate with defrag:

 

When we began to invest in Diskeeper we had 8 servers and over 100+ clients that ran for years and would run for many more years. Every 11 weeks we start a new quarter and cycled on average 400 users across all of them each quarter. So you can image the amount of data our students move across these machines. Not to mention the amount of data that is moved across our servers with 600+ users. 

Diskeeper drastically improved our disk performance and kept it constant with the automatic defragmentation during idle time. Diskeeper not only helped with maintaining the disk performance, but also made it possible for quick disaster recovery.

We had an old file server that crashed and file backups were being neglected, so we had to run file recovery on the RAID 5 array. Without Diskeeper automatically defragging the drive and keeping all the pieces of the files together, we would have lost 50% of the data; instead we were able to recover 95% of the 300 Gb of information. 

Aaron Cowell,

Network Administrator,

Davis College, Toledo, OH

Proud supporter of:

ShoreTel VOIP, Moodle, Microsoft, Diskeeper

Windows IT Pro analyst David Chernicoff just published a new white paper that covers the issues file fragmentation causes on SAN storage. It's titled "Maximize the Performance of your Windows SAN Infrastructure" and you can download it from their website (here). If you don't already have an account with them, you'll need to fill out a quick profile.

 

Government Computer News (GCN) just posted a review of the new Diskeeper 2010 product in an article titled "Defragging files without having to do a defrag".

The review keyed in on a unique and proprietary innovation that can only be found in Diskeeper; IntellliWrite. IntelliWrite is the only way to prevent fragmentation before it happens. 

What they found in their testing is, in a nutshell, Diskeeper makes your computer FAST! GCN did benchmarks with Passmark Performance 7.0 and found scores go from 300.6 (overall performance) and 202.4 (disk performance) to 311.8 and 218.1, respectively.

They also noted that Diskeeper 2010 was more than just a typical upgrade, it was a major innovation...

"We didn’t expect Diskeeper 2010 to actually get to the heart of the matter and fix the inherent problem with Windows operating systems that creates fragmented files in the first place. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it is essentially what Diskeeper has done. It’s all part of the company’s new IntelliWrite technology."

GCN gave Diskeeper 2010 the following score: 

Performance:  A
Ease of use: B+
Features: A
Value: A+ 

So, is GCN correct in their analysis? We decided to put them to the test.

Given Paul the Octopus'es 100% success rate predicting World Cup soccer (football) winners, we figured we'd test his skills on performance software as well.

 

Hey, what can you say, the cephalopod mollusk is good!

When you install Diskeeper or V-locity via Diskeeper Administrator, those installations are preconfigured to then send report and alert data back to that instance of Diskeeper Administrator. However, there are many means by which to install Diskeeper that do not include our central management piece. While you may have alternative preferred methods for deploying Diskeeper and V-locity across you network, you may well be interested in using some of the many other robust management aspect of Diskeeper Administrator. For most of those features, you'll want to ensure that the end point installs are aware of the location of the management app, and are sending it data. Having the clients aware of the Administrator supports valuable IT management functions like license management, performance reports, alerts, and more.

Good news is that there are a number of ways Diskeeper and V-locity installations can become “aware” of Diskeeper Administrator in order to send it information.

The easiest discovery method is, using Diskeeper Administrator, to scan the network and discover Diskeeper or V-locity clients on networked computers. A discovered system automatically becomes aware of the presence of Diskeeper Administrator and will start sending it data.

Another option is to use the provided Group Policy template to identify the central management piece for those end point installations.

The data (Diskeeper Administrator computer name) is stored in a text file on each Diskeeper client. So, another way to direct end points to Diskeeper Administrator would be to copy this text file, with the Diskeeper Administrator name already listed, to any/all Diskeeper client(s). This can be a handy option for image-based deployments.

 

As for an install time solution, there is a command line option in setup that can be used to specify the Diskeeper Administrator's location. The setup command line to specify a Diskeeper Administrator computer name with a Diskeeper or V-locity install is:

Setup.exe /s /V"/qn ADMINNAME=\"DKAdminComputerName\""

In summary, even when you use alternative means to deploy Diskeeper and/or V-locity across your network, there are many options to setup up clients for central management via Diskeeper Administrator.

Solution Helps Organizations Increase Performance, Lengthen Equipment Lifecycles, Enhance Efficiency and Reduce Energy Usage 

Diskeeper Corporation, innovators in performance and reliability technologies, today announced that it is commemorating  its 30th year of pioneering breakthrough technologies with more than a dozen industry firsts by offering discounts of up to 30 percent on all Diskeeper Corporation volume licenses.  

Company Highlights: 

• With more than 38 million licenses sold Diskeeper Corporation supports customers worldwide including more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 enterprises, and nearly 70 percent of the Forbes Global 1000, as well as thousands of enterprises, government agencies, independent software vendors (ISVs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

 

• CIOs, IT Managers and System Administrators around the world rely on Diskeeper ® performance software to increase computing speeds, reduce system freezes and crashes, improve backup times, lower resource usage, protect data and shorten boot times.

 

• Every day, Diskeeper Corporation solutions prevent more than 12.5 billion fragments from thrashing hard drives, providing unparalleled performance and reliability for laptops, desktops and servers.

 

• Diskeeper Corporation’s industry first Undelete® real time data protection solution saves organizations tremendous amounts of time and money by guarding against intentional and unintentional data loss, protecting all deleted files and allowing instant file recovery with just a few mouse clicks.

 Industry Firsts: 

• 1986: Diskeeper performance software released as the first online automatic defragmenter, which quickly became the best-selling third-party product for OpenVMS operating systems.
• 1995: Diskeeper is the first defragmenter solution certified for Microsoft Windows, starting a long-running verification process that maintains code reliability.
• 1995: Diskeeper Corporation partners with Microsoft and co-created APIs that were released with NT 4.0 in 1996.
• 1998 Network Undelete 1.0 unveiled as the first complete real-time file protection technology for Windows servers.
• 2003: Diskeeper 8.0 is introduced as a breakthrough approach to help optimize terabyte-sized drives with Terabyte Volume Engine™ technology.
• 2005: I-FAAST® intelligent file access acceleration sequencing technology introduced that accelerates access to most used files.
• 2006: InvisiTasking® technology revolutionizes background processing with zero overhead.
• 2008: Diskeeper releases HyperFast® solid state drive optimizer for PCs.
• 2009: Diskeeper Corporation introduces V-locity™ virtual platform disk optimizer.
• 2009: Diskeeper Corporation releases IntelliWriteÔ technology, the first fragmentation prevention technology.
• 2010: The release of HyperBoot™ boot-time optimization software, which accelerates full computer start up and boots a PC directly into Windows.

  

Diskeeper Corporation today announced the forthcoming release of the first disk I/O optimization solution for SAN-attached systems. This new product is the culmination of requests from enterprise customers, technical engagements with leading Storage Area Network (SAN) vendors, and internal company research projects.

Diskeeper Corporation products V-locity® virtual platform disk optimizer and the company's Diskeeper® performance software already have broad adoption on SAN-attached Windows operating systems.

"SAN administrators look to Diskeeper and V-locity to ensure that Windows clients are operating at peak disk I/O efficiency," notes Diskeeper Product Manager Michael Materie. "By eliminating logical fragmentation, via proactive prevention and intelligent defragmentation, SAN-attached Windows systems generate only the absolute minimum of I/O needed, maximizing the effectiveness of their existing storage infrastructure. With these I/O efficiencies, IT is able to save on additional disk drive provisioning costs, as well as the energy and space costs associated with adding more spindles."

Automatically eliminating file fragmentation on Windows® direct attached storage drives, both physical and virtual, is well known as vital to maximize performance, reliability, system longevity and energy savings. However, its use on SAN systems requires special configurations (e.g. Thin Provisioning) that today, require manual IT oversight.

The new SAN-targeted solution will automate many of the manual requirements necessary today, as well as offering new advanced solutions to assist with space reclamation and provisioning in SAN LUNs. While the core SAN optimization solution will be SAN vendor agnostic, Diskeeper Corporation technology alliances with key SAN vendors will offer advanced functionality and performance. 

We'll be at TechEd June 6th-10th in New Orleans enjoying cajun cooking and talking up Diskeeper 2010 and the upcoming V-locity 2.0 release. Stop by our booth (#1941)!

Diskeeper Corporation will be exhibiting at VMworld at the end of August.    Our CTO, Gary Quan has made it to the next stage in the selection process!  New this year, they are giving the public a chance to vote on what sessions they'd like to see at VMworld.   

Anyone with a vmworld.com account can go to the voting website and give a 'thumbs up' for the sessions they like. In order to vote, you do need a vmworld.com account. If you do not have one yet, you can create one for free, at www.vmworld.com/login.jspa 

Below is a direct link to the Technology and Architecture track the proposed session is included in. The listing is about half way down the list. 

Under the Virtual Covers ñ Best Practices for Keeping Virtual Systems Performing Optimally
Breakout Session
	"Corporate economic demands for greater consolidation and agility have given rise to virtual environment technology. The dynamic nature of virtualized environments presents new challenges in keeping these systems running optimally. The promise is great...More
	Speaker: Gary Quan Company: Diskeeper Corporation

 http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/tarchitecture  

Please vote!  

 

As a Gold Partner, the first commercial defragmenter designed for WHS, and even one of the first 8 products to declare support for WHS when Bill Gates first announced it at CES several years back, we’ve been real close with the development team at MS.

 

The MS team’s insight into the needs and capabilities of defrag has led to significant cooperation as they complete the new Drive Extender. We’ve had many calls over the past months and are very happy to say that many of our suggestions and requests have been accommodated. The functionality that has been added from those meetings will result in well integrated and functional third party software solutions.

 

Supporting Drive Extender 2.0…

 

Vail, which is in public beta, has already been generating a great deal of buzz on WHS forums. Drive Extender (DE) is a storage subsystem that extends storage functionality above and beyond what a typical Windows NTFS volume offers. Key purposes of DE are to offer fully automated and easy to use storage. All the complexities associated with fault tolerance solutions like RAID to provide drive reliability, expanding storage over time, and even solving data reliability concerns of commodity drives.

 

Drive Extender in Windows Home Server today implements drives independently and pools them into a common volume. This pool of storage is then presented as a single volume to the user (i.e. D:\). And, just off the root of this pool (D:\shares) you had all your WHS shared folders; e.g. Users, Photos, Videos, etc…

 

The user experience of WHS today is already such that you don’t need to care or interact with the volumes, you could even argue that its discouraged.

 

What is unique in DE 2.0 is that this paradigm has kind of been flip flopped. While it all still looks like a common repository the delineation of storage now begins with those shared folders. So, as an example, let’s take the shared folder “Photos”. In DE 2.0 that folder now becomes a dedicated NTFS volume presented out of the shared storage pool. The folder “Videos” becomes its own NTFS volume, and so on. This design was introduced to support features like real time folder level duplication, etc.. The only minor side effect is that because there are only 26 letters in the English Alphabet, there will be a limitation of the shared folders you can create in this location on WHS. Not a big deal, given the value of the features that this new design offers.

 

If you’ve read this blog and the comments, you’ll pick up that DE is extending a volume (i.e. a shared folder), in 1 GB chunks, taking those chunks from the total available storage pool.  

 

What you effectively have with Drive Extender, then and now, is storage virtualization. Any time you pool storage and then divvy it up exclusively to requestors (in this case the shared folders that become lettered volumes) you need some form of logic for allocating data from the pool. SAN and virtualization administrators already understand this concept, including related technologies such as Thin Provisioning.  

DE 2.0 now adds this to their storage virtualization solution. As you add more data to a shared folder, DE 2.0 will allocate, in 1 GB chunks, more space to the shared folder/volume from the common storage pool. And, should you delete ALL the data in a 1 GB chunk, the 1 GB chunk will dynamically return to the available storage pool to be allocated to any other shared folder that may need the space. DE is well designed to fill up 1 GB chunk before requesting to use more. Very cool stuff!

 

Here’s a demo of how the provisioning works. Assuming 20GB of space (divided into those 1GB chunks)

  

 

You now start to fill up storage adding a little over 4GB of photos and a little over 2GB of music files. That has now pulled eight 1GB chunks from the common pool and these volumes have dynamically expanded to hold up to 5 GB and 3 GB respectively. Keep in mind that files place in the Photos folder will NOT reside on the same 1 GB chunk that contains Music files. In this case, under the DE “covers” they are on completely separate Windows volumes.

  

And, as those eight 1 GB chunks are provisioned to shared folder volumes, the storage pool shrinks by 8GB.

 

  

Now… If you delete all the MP3 music files that reside in one of those 1GB chunks…

  

DE can return that chunk back to the storage pool for re-provisioning re-use with any other shared folder.

 

 

Subsequently shrinking the Music folder/volume to two 1 GB chunks:

 

 

However, there are some conditions in which this provisioning technique can use some assistance, and Diskeeper will be helping out (per the request of the WHS/DE team at MS). Should you delete some of the data from 1 GB chunks, but not all of the data within a 1 GB chunk, you can have a lot of 1 GB chunks allocated to a shared folder/volume, but not actually using all of the space it is taking from the common storage pool. Diskeeper will be helping in these cases to group together all the data spread across sparsely filled 1 GB chunks. We’ll effectively be squishing the data together aligning it along 1 GB boundaries. The benefit of this is that some 1 GB chunks may then be freed up and returned to the storage pool to be assigned to your other shared folders.

 

Here’s a quick graphic to explain the process. Five 1 GB chunks are taken up by the Photos folder/volume. Over time, unwanted photos may be deleted, but the space they were taking up is not made available to any folder other than Photos. In order to make the space (3GB in this example) available for Videos or Music, you would need to move the data out of the sparsely filled chunks. Once done, those now empty 1 GB chunks can be used elsewhere.

 

  

Is this an issue you’ll come across? Maybe. If you do, it’ll likely be a bit of time and a lot of file deletions down the road. The Microsoft provisioning design is well suited to most users who mainly add and retain data. Those who do housecleaning or more involved data management can benefit from the upcoming Diskeeper solution – stay tuned.

 

While we’d like to take credit for this new feature in a future release of Diskeeper HomeServer, it was quite frankly MS directly asking us, as a partner, to add this into our product. Perhaps they’ll add this data squishing into WHS down the road? In the mean time, you can look to Diskeeper to help.

 

PS: thanks to the Microsoft WHS team for reviewing and approving this blog post.

     

We have been running Diskeeper 2010 EnterpriseServer for two months on an HP EVA SAN 4000 and 4400, with 4 1TB volumes each.  

Diskeeper removed over 45 million fragments in the last two months on a specific volume that had only 15% free space, and IntelliWrite prevented 24,000 fragments. I believe that will be even better as soon as we can extend this volume to two TB. 

We see a big improvement on the backup time which came down from 48 hours to 32 now, and it’s still going down. 

I believe Diskeeper worth the price and I never had any trouble with software from Diskeeper Corporation, so that alone narrowed the field of choices. 

Jean-François Poirier
Technicien Telecommunication
Spectra Premium Industries Inc.

Later this month (Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 12:00pm Eastern / 9:00am Pacific), IT Analyst David Chernicoff and I will co-host a webinar covering the benefits and caveats of defragmenting SAN attached servers.

Here is the abstract: 

As storage technologies have become more advanced there is a tendency for storage administrators to believe that the hardware is handling all of their data maintenance needs, keeping their files optimized in the best possible way for top performance and availability. The reality is that hardware solutions alone aren't the most efficient way to keep your critical data stored in an optimal fashion. With this webinar we will give you the information you need to understand how your data is actually being handled and what you can do to improve the performance and optimization of your Windows Server storage.

You can register here: www.windowsitpro.com/go/seminars/diskeeper/windows_san 

We also have two webinars planned for June on the topic of virtualization. One jointly with Redmond Mag, and the other with Microsoft. I'll post registration links on this blog when they are available. Lastly, we'll have a reprise of the SSD webinar we did with Microsoft sometime in July - this time we'll host and Microsoft will be our guest.

Diskeeper Administrator can be used to remotely "un-install" Diskeeper from computers, and reclaim the software license to be re-used on another system. However, decommissioning a machine isn't always planned, and even when it is, removing software is not likely part of the process. In such cases, you can still reclaim the Diskeeper license from the target machine.  

Here is the process: 

1. Open Diskeeper Administrator.

2. Select the Manage Diskeeper option from the Quick Launch pane.

3. Select the Manage Diskeeper Computers and Custom Groups option located under the Manage Diskeeper menu.

4. Through either Active Directory or Network Neighborhood browse options, locate the machine that should be removed.

5. When you find it, right-click on that machine name and choose Remove.

6. This operation may take a moment or two but not only should it remove that machine’s name from the Active Directory or Network Neighborhood view, it should also put that license back in your count of available licenses.

There is another option, introduced a few years ago which comes in real handy for dynamic AD networks with frequent system changes called Automatic Defrag Management. That allows you to establish policies (deployment/configuration) in advance and let Diskeeper Administrator handle everything, including license management, automatically from there on out.

We just updated and released a new version of a popular freeware product for IT Professionals managing Windows networks. The DPAN 3.0 feature set was already included in Diskeeper Administrator 2010 release, but is now available independently (and free).  

Specifically the DPAN 3.0 free app now implements the following new features:

• Support for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2

• Support for 64-bit operating systems

• Scanning Active Directory security groups

• Improved Performance Reports consistent with Diskeeper 2010 and Diskeeper Administrator 2010

• Help that explains DPAN operation and reports

• UI and usability improvements

You can download it here. 

 

Sure I'd love to give a recommendation for Diskeeper.  We are running 2010 now with Diskeeper Administrator and so far I love the improvements. Many of our Lotus Domino servers were so busy that realtime defrag had trouble keeping up, but with the new IntelliWrite technology preventing most of the fragmentation in the first place, we finally have it under control.

 

The systems were running well prior to introducing Diskeeper, but we deployed the software during a project where we virtualized over 80% of our production servers.  Because of the shared storage aspect of our virtual platform I knew that fragmentation would become a serious issue if we didn't deal with it from day one.  The  Lotus Domino servers often had trouble keeping up with the fragmentation rate but most other servers did well with Diskeeper Server 2008.   

The new Diskeeper 2010 has our fragmentation in check across the boards and I couldn't be happier with it.

 

 

Josh Currier, Network Manager - Munters Americas

Amesbury, MA

http://www.muntersglobal.com

 

Munters is the  global leader in energy-efficient air treatment solutions and restoration services based on expertise within humidity and climate-control techniques.  Munters is organized in three divisions; Dehumidification, MCS (Moisture Control Serviced) and HumiCool. Customers are served in a wide range of segments, the most important being the insurance, utilities, food, pharma and electronics industries. Manufacturing and sales are carried out via the Group’s own companies in 30 countries. The Group has approx. 4000 employees and net sales of SEK 6,650 million.

Last month we were a guest on a Microsoft-hosted webinar covering Windows 7, TRIM, and the continuing need for HyperFast. The presentation focused on the most current releases of SSDs from many of the top SSD vendors (Asax, Apacer, Kingston, Micron and OCZ), who were kind enough to provide us with samples. The webinar discussed Windows 7 features to enhance SSDs, covered the benefits of SSD over HDD, and lastly discussed the performance loss due to file fragmentation. That presentation continues to be available for MS partners on the MS partner site.

In the next few months Diskeeper will re-host this presentation, this time with Microsoft as a guest. That webinar will be posted here on the Diskeeper website for everyone to view.

In the meantime, I've included some of the key slides for anyone interested. The tests present aggregate averages from all the SSDs tested, as the purpose was to show their value above HDD, and not as a comparison of one vendor's SSD versus another.  I also realize that there may be questions as to test scenario specifics, etc... Those details were covered in the presentation on Microsoft's site, and will be covered again when Diskeeper hosts the next presentation in a couple of months. So, if you'd like to get into more detail, go to the MS partner portal or stay tuned for the Diskeeper hosted syndication.

The presentation starts by showing that a typical modern SATA SSD (average from above named vendors) clearly outperforms a typical modern SATA HDD.

SSD versus HDD MB/Sec Transfer Rates:

Windows 7 has numerous improvements to accommodate SSDs:

And...

Fragmentation affects SSDs, and yes, even those with TRIM support. Various benchmarking tools and procedures were used to measure the affect of fragmentation on TRIMM'ed SSD performance. (note: TRIM can be initiated in Windows by actions such as emptying the Recycle Bin, but the SSD must also execute the command).

Fragmented SSD versus Optimized SSD test using ATTO Benchmark:

 Fragmented SSD versus Optimized SSD test using HDBench:

 

Fragmented SSD versus Optimized SSD test using PCMark05: 

Fragmented SSD versus Optimized SSD test using File Copy Test:

Using a specialized SSD optimizer such as HyperFast returns performance to like-new conditions:

In summary, if you want a top performing system, go get Windows 7 and one of those SSDs named above. Then add HyperFast to keep it that way.

We're looking for some current Diskeeper or V-locity customers that are interested in field testing a major new V-locity release. The new version will support both Hyper-V and ESX (3.5 and 4.0).

The field tests will start in a few weeks.

If you are a current customer and are interested and able to install, evaluate and then comment (fill out a 5 minute online survey) on this software, simply fill-out a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) located here.

Fax the signed NDA to:
Fax: 818-252-5514

Please add the following to the Fax cover page:
Attn: Field Test Administrator/V-locity Field Test

Alternatively you can email the signed NDA (scan in the pages with your signature) to our Field Test administrator. Please add "V-locity Field Test" in the subject line.

DIskeeper TO PROVIDE HyperBoot

Boot-Time Optimization Technology

Company Partners With ASUS to Reduce Boot Times

Burbank, CA—March 18, 2010—Diskeeper Corporation closed a second worldwide distribution agreement with ASUS, global OEM, pioneer and leader in the netbook category. Diskeeper will provide its newest HyperBoot™ boot-time optimization technology on ASUS’s forthcoming Windows® 7 notebook models.

“Diskeeper is rapidly becoming a technology player in the OEM market,” notes Mr. Gary Quan, Chief Technology Officer. “The deal with ASUS marks yet another OEM who will provide HyperBoot technology to give their users the fastest boot-up speeds available.”

HyperBoot puts an end to slow boot up times—permanently. In fact, on most machines this technology automatically provides decreased boot times from 20 to 48 percent depending on  processor, memory and configuration. Installed at the manufacturing stage, it begins “learning” a computer’s boot pattern from the first time the computer is started up and optimizes it thereafter for peak performance. Click on the below YouTube clip to see a live lab test of HyperBoot in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ft8dbyMVWw.

HyperBoot is currently available to ODM/OEMs globally. For further information, please contact Mr. Modesto Rodriguez, VP Business Development, at 818.771.1600 ext. 1734 or visit http://www.diskeeper.com/hyperboot/.

###

About Diskeeper Corporation—Innovators in Performance and Reliability Technologies®: CIOs, IT Managers and System Administrators of Global Fortune 1000 and Forbes 500 enterprises rely on Diskeeper software to provide unparalleled performance and reliability to their business laptops, desktops and servers. Diskeeper 2010 is the only product to prevent fragmentation before it happens. Diskeeper Corporation further provides real-time data protection and real-time data recovery™ with Undelete® data recovery software (www.undelete.com). InvisiTasking® technology enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background, fully tapping the power of otherwise unused idle resources (www.invisitasking.com).

© 2010 Diskeeper Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Diskeeper, Undelete, InvisiTasking, HyperBoot, real-time data protection and real-time data recovery and Innovators in Performance and Reliability Technologies are trademarks owned by Diskeeper Corporation. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.