When you installed a SAN you thought that you would improve your reliability, performance, availability and provisioning. And you were right. But later you may have noticed that the SAN no longer performed as well as it had at the outset. Application response time had increased. File-loading times were longer. And applications loaded from SAN storage took longer to launch.

Noticing the slowdown, you may have decided that you had problems with free space or available storage (and you did). You many have settled on increasing the amount of available storage as the remedy. If you did, don’t feel alone: you have plenty of company.

Many administrators believe that fragmentation is a problem that has gone away.
Fragmentation didn’t disappear with direct-attached storage devices; actually, due to the growth in file sizes, today files fragment more easily. With today’s files being written to and being read at higher rates, the accumulation rate for fragmentation is faster, too. So fragmentation is still happening in your system, and more than ever.

SANs provide extremely efficient, high-performance data storage. But if fragmentation occurs when your data is written to storage – and it does unless you prevent it – then fragmentation reduces system performance as well as the SAN’s storage efficiency.

This all happens because SANs have no control over the way your operating system writes data to them. They are not built to prevent or correct fragmentation. When you store information in your SAN, fragmentation at the file system level creates operating system overhead that interferes with file retrieval. These events are not caused by the SAN and it’s outside the scope of your SAN to do anything about them.

So you need to defragment to improve performance in such cases. Although fragmentation didn’t go away with direct-attached storage, manual defragmentation certainly did. Defragmentation needs to be automatic to be cost effective. For example, defragmentation has been automated for years by Diskeeper Corporation’s defragmentation applications, designed for use on systems ranging from individual workstations to enterprise servers.

But today Diskeeper® performance software can do your SAN an even bigger favor than automatic defrag. By the time fragmentation has occurred, the system has already wasted precious I/O resources by writing those fragmented files to cluttered spaces on the disk. A newer and better strategy is to prevent fragmentation from happening in the first place. Diskeeper 2010 does exactly that. You’ll find that clean disks on servers, workstations and laptops result in better speed and efficiency, with systems lasting years longer due to reduced drive wear.

This is all much easier on the budget than throwing more expensive spindles at your SAN performance issues.

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® performance software to provide unparalleled performance and reliability to their business laptops, desktops and servers. Diskeeper® 2010 includes the breakthrough IntelliWrite™ fragmentation prevention technology. V-locity 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware and Hyper-V eliminates the barriers to full virtual efficiency and maximum I/O performance on virtual servers. 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).

Author Bio: Colleen Toumayan is the VP Public Relations for Diskeeper Corporation. Diskeeper Corporation can be found at http://www.diskeeper.com.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: SAN,defrag,disk defragment,defragmenter,Diskeeper,