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

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

Diskeeper’s Data Performance Software Cuts Four-Day Backup Time in Half

In addition to increased backup data transfer speeds, since installing Diskeeper, drive failures have decreased, fewer drives have been replaced on the SAN, and Diskeeper has also improved access times

London — David Anderson, Network Manager for Cramlington Learning Village School, gave his feedback on how Diskeeper® dramatically cut their server backup times in half. The school, which has been graded 'outstanding' in the last three OFSTED inspections, had the problem of backup times taking four days to complete.

“Symantec BackupExec V12.5, our primary backup application, was taking considerable amount of time to backup due to file fragmentation. Microsoft 2003 Windows and other free defrag tools were not providing an adequate level of defragmentation when working with our large terabyte drives,” comments David Anderson.

He further states: “We tried and tested numerous products and found Diskeeper had the best results... Diskeeper was not only easy to deploy but also proved to decrease the time our backups now take, by an average of 50%... Our backup software showed improved data transfer speed going from 500m/bits per minute to now 1Gb per minute. We have Diskeeper installed onto ten MS Windows 2003 servers which have numerous SAN drives attached to each one. We use an EMC CX3-10 SAN.”

It was also noted by Mr Anderson that the Support Contract Company had said there shouldn’t be a problem with fragmentation related issues. “Our Support Contract Company said there shouldn’t be an issue with fragmentation. However, since installing Diskeeper, drive failures have decreased, and we also don’t have to replace as many drives on the SAN as often as before. Diskeeper also helps with improved access times.”

A recent survey carried out with the existing customers of Diskeeper Corporation Europe, showed over 75% have implemented or are planning to implement a SAN solution. The same survey also revealed that 80% were aware of the detrimental effect of fragmentation on I/O performance.

Mandeep Birdi, Technical Presales Consultant of Diskeeper Corporation Europe comments: “I think Diskeeper is vital for file servers and backup servers, and now that we are preventing over 85% of fragmentation from happening, this means preventing latency of backup times. Our intelliwrite® fragmentation technology also reduces the I/O bottleneck which has a huge effect on performance. So we are, in effect, not only reducing backup times but also improving disk I/O performance as well within the SAN environment.”

About Diskeeper Corporation – Microsoft Gold Certified 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. http://www.diskeeper.com

Diskeeper® - Innovators in Performance and Reliability technologies®

For further 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’s Data Performance Software Cuts Four-Day Backup Time in Half