Scalability and Backup Recovery found to be Key in Virtualisation Adoption, reveals Survey

So why the hesitancy?

London — A survey conducted by Symantec on 3,700 information technology managers in 35 countries, entitled “Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud” revealed key points in what benefits businesses expect from implementing a virtual strategy. While there were many findings, some specific findings also showed two-thirds of enterprises list performance degradation as a somewhat/extremely large factor in their hesitation to place business-critical applications into a private cloud.

An excerpt from the Symantec whitepaper stated performance can be a factor that either drives virtualization or inhibits it. While virtualization/cloud computing can help streamline operations and save money, sacrificing performance is not an option. Any gains in other areas will be negated if customers and employees are unable to work within a fast, secure environment that provides maximum uptime. Among organizations that have implemented storage virtualization, 84 percent of respondents stated that one of their goals in doing so was to improve storage performance or speed. In contrast, two-thirds of enterprises list performance degradation as a somewhat/extremely large factor in their hesitation to place business-critical applications into a private cloud.

One key question in the survey asked how important the following goals were at the time of implementing server virtualisation and showed the following:

• 88% said somewhat/completely important to improve the scalability of our servers
• 87% said somewhat/completely important to reduce expenses
• 85% said somewhat/completely important to improve up-time and availability
• 83% said somewhat/completely important to improve recovery readiness
• 83% said somewhat/completely important to improve server speed

This hesitancy to fully implement a virtual environment is very much highlighted in another survey which was published in a whitepaper sponsored by EMC and carried out in conjunction with Computing.

• 5% have virtualised 96-100% of their IT infrastructure
• 17% have virtualised 70-95% of their IT infrastructure
• 16% have virtualised 50-69% of their IT infrastructure
• 21% have virtualised 30-49% of their IT infrastructure
• 16% have virtualised 10-29% of their IT infrastructure
• 10% have virtualised 10% of their IT infrastructure
• 15% have virtualised none of their IT infrastructure

The above statistics show that companies are only gradually going to a virtual environment, and by doing so hope to reduce expenses, improve scalability, improve performance and increase disaster recovery preparedness.

Technical Presales Consultant at Diskeeper Corporation Europe, Mandeep Birdi comments “From these statistics we know virtualisation to some degree is now very much a part of many organisations, but whilst implementing server virtualization, IT management need to also consider ways to ensure optimal performance in their virtual infrastructure. A major problem inherent in virtual infrastructures is that windows based virtual machines can generate excess I/Os as a result of fragmentation This unfortunately results in large performance drops on the host through these unnecessary I/Os and this can impact the success of the migrations. Our software solution, V-locity® virtual platform disk optimiser was specifically developed to address this issue.”


About Diskeeper Corporation - Microsoft Gold Partner
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 2011 includes the breakthrough IntelliWrite® fragmentation prevention technology. V-locity® 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware ESX 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 (http://www.undelete.com). InvisiTasking® technology enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background, fully tapping the power of otherwise unused idle resources (http://www.invisitasking.com).


For more information, please contact:

Dorian Culmer
Public Relations Manager - United Kingdom
Diskeeper Corporation Europe
Suite 226, Shaw House
Pegler Way
Crawley
West Sussex
RH11 7AF
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 1293 763 060
d.culmer@diskeeper.co.uk
http://www.diskeeper.com
http://www.twitter.com/DiskeeperEurope
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Diskeeper-UK/153866791341541

Scalability and Backup Recovery found to be Key in Virtualisation Adoption, reveals Survey

Models of Diversity Founder Angel Sinclair Appointed Vice President of Advance Centre for the Scotson Technique Charity

(left to right) Angel Sinclair, founder of Models of Diversity with Linda Scotson, founder of Advance Centre of The Scotson Technique

Advance Centre for the Scotson Technique to be Models of Diversity's only chosen charity

East Grinstead - Former model and founder of Models of Diversity has been appointed Vice President of the Sussex-based Advance Centre for the Scotson Technique Charity by its founder, Linda Scotson.

When Angel saw how The Scotson Technique had improved the life of Linda's son Doran, born with severe brain damage and cerebral palsy, she was so moved that she wanted to support Advance to enable many more children like Doran to be similarly helped.

The Scotson Technique, developed by Linda Scotson in 2002, is a unique, gentle, deeply restorative rehabilitation therapy for children and young adults with cerebral palsy, autism, brain injury or other neurologically related conditions.

At Doran's birth, Linda Scotson was told that he would never walk or talk. However, thanks to The Scotson Technique, Doran - now aged 32 - has run two half marathons and is also an artist and he can hold a very good conversation. He has a great sense of humour and is very charismatic.

An additional personal reason that Angel decided to support Advance is because she has a nephew, Curtis, aged 20, with cerebral palsy and has helped Curtis' parents with respite for most of his life.

Angel Sinclair, the founder of Models of Diversity and Sinclair Model Management, is a former model herself and appeared on Gok’s 'Miss Naked Beauty' in 2008. Angel was struck by the great variety of beautiful women participating in the event and how that contrasted with the narrow range we see in the fashion industry. That’s when she decided to promote the use of models that reflects diversity in society, in terms of race, shape, age and ability. Angel campaigns for equality on the catwalk and her portfolio of models includes people of all races, ages, shapes, sizes and abilities - and that includes those with disabilities such as cerebral palsy. At a recent fund-raising fashion show for another charity, one of the models on the catwalk was Doran Scotson himself!

As Vice President, Angel's responsibilities will include both raising funds and raising Advance's profile. Advance will now be mentioned in Angel's e-mail signature as Model of Diversity's only chosen charity, and a link to Advance's website will be included on the Model of Diversity's website.

"I feel honoured to take on this role which I will do to the best of my ability and will raise much needed funds for this wonderful charity," says Angel on her appointment as Advance's Vice President.

"We are so lucky to be supported by Angel - a vibrant woman who has the warmth and compassion to want to help us, and the drive and energy to make things happen," says Linda Scotson, Advance's founder.

About Models of Diversity
Models of Diversity advocates for more diversity in models, and demands that the fashion and marketing industries recognise the beauty in women of all races, ages, shapes, sizes and abilities. Their mission is to change the face of fashion and modelling. They sponsor modelling workshops for people with disabilities, campaign against the tragic effects of the size zero culture, and fight inequality in the representation of real men and women. They look at catwalk shows, advertising and the glossies and rarely see a true representation of real people. http://www.modelsofdiversity.org/


About Advance Centre for the Scotson Technique Charity

Advance Centre teaches the parents of brain-injured children how to deliver The Scotson Technique (TST), a drug-free respiratory-based exercise to help nourish the brain with extra oxygen that it needs for more normal development. The technique, developed by Linda Scotson after 15 years of research into breathing and recovery of function after brain injury at University College London, Psychology Department, has been extremely successful in helping brain-injured children overcome movement, learning and behavioural difficulties. The Advance Centre teaching institute is based in West Sussex in the UK with centres in Slovakia, South Africa, Namibia and the Philippines. http://www.advancecentres.com

For more information, please contact:

Advance Centre
..for The Scotson Technique
The Bradbury House
6 Station Road
East Grinstead
West Sussex
RH19 1DJ
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1342 311137
Fax: +44 (0)1342 305159
info@advancecentres.com
http://www.advancecentres.com

Models of Diversity Founder Angel Sinclair Appointed Vice President of Advance Centre for the Scotson Technique Charity

Survey Reveals How the Stressful Work Environment of IT Managers Can Be Improved

Help desk calls, hangs, freezes and crashes cut by up to 25 percent with new performance software

London — a survey receiving almost 400 respondents carried out on IT and business staff revealed healthy percentage reductions of computer freezes, hangs and crashes, as well as reduced help desk calls when they installed Diskeeper® data performance software on their IT systems. The survey also revealed that the automated defragmentation and disk management tools Diskeeper brings is an essential component of their IT arsenal.

The survey, which was broken down into three categories – system reliability, system performance and business improvements and benefits, was conducted on IT Managers and Business Development Managers. Questions included specific reliability issues such as I/O activity, system crashes, file corruption, data loss, and help desk issues.

Key survey results (400 respondents – IT and Business Managers):

• 18% reduction in the number of helpdesk calls
• 26% reduction in system hangs and/or freezes
• 25% reduction in system crashes
• 21% reduction in program and/or system conflicts and errors
• 25% reduced filed corruption and data loss
• 35% reduction in unnecessary I/O activity
• 26% reduced hard drive failures

This information is also in-line with an earlier survey carried out last year by Vanson Bourne on 100 IT Managers – Slow computers, lost password and system crashes ranked highest respectively for IT complaints.

“These problems hamper IT managers and companies in one form or another on a day-to-day basis. Any solution which can comprehensively address them should be paramount. Just one of these issues could easily justify implementing some kind of third-party solution. The cost for companies is huge, although it just might be a little camouflaged on first inspection.” Thomas Doria, New Business Development Manager at Diskeeper Corporation Europe.

Some of the survey respondents commented on their use of Diskeeper as follows:

“By drastically reducing hard drive failures and I/O times we have been able to keep our servers on the job longer with no performance degradation.”

“Reliability and improved performance are the primary benefits and deciding factors as to why we choose Diskeeper”

“Faster backups; reduced backup times by hours and reduced the amount of time it took to restore a file”

About Diskeeper Corporation - Microsoft Gold Partner
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 2011 includes the breakthrough IntelliWrite® fragmentation prevention technology. V-locity® 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware ESX 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 (http://www.undelete.com). InvisiTasking® technology enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background, fully tapping the power of otherwise unused idle resources (http://www.invisitasking.com).

For more information, please contact:

Dorian Culmer
Public Relations Manager - United Kingdom
Diskeeper Corporation Europe
Suite 226, Shaw House
Pegler Way
Crawley
West Sussex
RH11 7AF
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 1293 763 060
d.culmer@diskeeper.co.uk
http://www.diskeeper.com
http://www.twitter.com/DiskeeperEurope
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Diskeeper-UK/153866791341541

Submitted by: WorldWidePR.net

Survey Reveals How the Stressful Work Environment of IT Managers Can Be Improved

Diskeeper Corporation: Disaster Recovery Drives Virtualization Strategy

But many IT personnel are not aware of the hidden costs

Fragmentation in a
virtual environment

London — A survey conducted last year by Techtarget showed 33% percent planned to use a virtualization strategy to take advantage of the disaster recovery and high availability benefits. 23% also viewed virtualization’s benefits as a backup and data protection solution. A separate survey this year conducted by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by CA Technologies showed downtime costs businesses more than 127 million person-hours per year.

“Ensuring uptime is at the top of every IT administrators list. With virtualization you can automatically move virtual machines from one host to another and even from one data centre to another – so they’ll stay up and running, with little or no downtime, in case of a failure,” says Mandeep Birdi, Senior Presales Consultant at Diskeeper Corporation Europe.

However, more that 30% of both VMware and Microsoft virtualization users identified backing up VM data as a challenge, and also indentified storage management, I/O bottlenecks and server availability monitoring as major virtualization challenges.
Another survey conducted by Diskeeper Corporation Europe of 500 IT personnel showed 80% were aware of the major problems of I/O bottlenecks.

Mandeep Birdi comments, “Effectively shared resources are of critical importance in a virtual environment, but are severely impacted by three key barriers: I/O bandwidth bottlenecks due to accelerated fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machines competing for shared I/O resources and not effectively prioritized across the platform and thirdly, virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not resize when data is deleted – an issue known as bloating. Instead free space is simply just wasted. These problems can result in actually costing the company unnecessary spend on additional hardware as well as time in dealing with the issues”.

The survey also highlighted that 25% of respondents are not dealing with the problems of I/O bottlenecks, while 5% said they just purchase more disks/spindles.
Adding to this, Mandeep Birdi also reported that many IT users who are migrating to or have migrated over to a virtual environment, and have typically employed a SAN, are being told they don’t need to defragment the SAN, and that there isn’t an I/O bottleneck issue. He comments “This is false, the I/O bottleneck issue can have a huge effect on performance, and if the customer is not aware that this is what’s occurring in the SAN environment, it can again end up costing the company a lot of money with thinking they have to purchase more hardware, when in fact this might not be the case at all.”

About Diskeeper Corporation - Microsoft Gold Partner
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 2011 includes the breakthrough IntelliWrite® fragmentation prevention technology. V-locity® 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware ESX 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 (http://www.undelete.com). InvisiTasking® technology enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background, fully tapping the power of otherwise unused idle resources (http://www.invisitasking.com).

For more information, please contact:

Dorian Culmer
Public Relations Manager - United Kingdom
Diskeeper Corporation Europe
Suite 226, Shaw House
Pegler Way
Crawley
West Sussex
RH11 7AF
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 1293 763 060
d.culmer@diskeeper.co.uk
http://www.diskeeper.com
http://www.twitter.com/DiskeeperEurope
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Diskeeper-UK/153866791341541

Diskeeper Corporation: Disaster Recovery Drives Virtualization Strategy

IT Manager and Microsoft Certified Partner Brian Le Flem reveals his personal experience with Diskeeper

Diskeeper improves server performance at the Northern Ireland branch of BITC

London — IT Manager and MCP Brian Le Flem recently gave an account of his personal experiences using Diskeeper® data performance software, and why he took it from a home user application to implementing it in his IT network at BITC. The Northern Ireland based company which helps local businesses act responsibly and make a positive impact on their local communities implemented Diskeeper as a result of Brian’s past experiences of the product.

“My commitment to Diskeeper actually started prior to my becoming an IT Manager. I have been using Diskeeper at home for many years, and my initial reason for using it was that I had noticed my PC getting slower over time. After I installed Diskeeper, I noticed an immediate improvement, and it soon felt like my PC was new again.”

Brian continues: “When I secured my current role as IT Manager, one of the first things I did was to get Diskeeper for our Network, as I knew it would increase performance at work… I stand by my initial perception, as our File Server is still running perfectly, with no lag in access times or Backup Times, so I know Diskeeper is doing the job I purchased it for!”

“We are a medium-sized organization with 3 HP G5/G6 Servers running Windows 2003 & Windows 2008; the roles include our Domain Controller, Exchange 2007, and Citrix. We have approximately 45 workstations connected to the Network… Having Diskeeper on our Servers and PCs keeps them working optimally. Without Diskeeper, our PCs & Servers slow down over time, but I know that having Diskeeper keeps our equipment working like new. Also, having the central console makes deployment and management of Diskeeper easy, and with the new IntelliWrite® and I-FAAST® technologies, there is no work required on my part – An optimized system with no extra work for the IT Staff? A no-brainer for any company.” Brian Le Flem, IT Manager and MCP, BITC.

A whitepaper entitled “The Impact of Disk Fragmentation on Servers” backs up this endorsement with proven tests and makes the following statement:
“The single, consistent result that appears in all of our tests is that defragmented server drives using Diskeeper deliver better performance. Every application that touches the hard drive will benefit from a good tool that defragments and manages the files on your servers.” To download the whitepaper click here: http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/The-Impact-Of-Disk-Fragmentation-On-Servers.pdf?APID=pps0006991

About Diskeeper Corporation - Microsoft Gold Partner
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 2011 includes the breakthrough IntelliWrite® fragmentation prevention technology. V-locity® 2.0 virtual platform disk optimizer for VMware ESX 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 (http://www.undelete.com). InvisiTasking® technology enables any process to run completely invisibly in the background, fully tapping the power of otherwise unused idle resources (http://www.invisitasking.com).

For more information, please contact:

Dorian Culmer
Public Relations Manager - United Kingdom
Diskeeper Corporation Europe
Suite 226, Shaw House
Pegler Way
Crawley
West Sussex
RH11 7AF
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 1293 763 060
d.culmer@diskeeper.co.uk
http://www.diskeeper.com
http://www.twitter.com/DiskeeperEurope
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Diskeeper-UK/153866791341541

IT Manager and Microsoft Certified Partner Brian Le Flem reveals his personal experience with Diskeeper