When Defrag Becomes Truly Automatic

BURBANK, CA--(Marketwire - May 27, 2008) - "Automatic" has always been a matter of degree. Take transportation, for example. When the automobile was first invented, it was such an advance from the horse-and-buggy that it was considered a modern marvel. Never mind the fact you had to throw your shoulder out of joint cranking it to get it started, and be cleverly coordinated to operate the shift and the clutch if you didn't want to displace vertebrae of yourself and your passengers. Inventions like the automatic starter and then the automatic transmission showed us just how hard we'd been working -- now we could just turn the key, accelerate, brake and steer and leave the rest to the car. Someday it won't even be that hard; we'll just speak commands and the vehicle will go where we tell it.

Computers have advanced in much the same way. We were once extremely thankful for gargantuan machines that were so complicated it took geniuses to operate them. Then came transistors, then came interfaces, then came English commands, then came clickable Icons (to greatly abbreviate a huge amount of progress). Someday in the not-too-distant future we'll simply utter commands into tiny PDAs and whole vast operations will be completed, and we'll wonder how we ever got along before.

In many ways, computer programmers have not been as kind to themselves and the IT departments of the world as they have to users and consumers. While such complex tasks as running an entire commercial office building from power to security or operating a whole factory floor have been totally automated, IT personnel are still having to perform many tasks that comparatively leave them back there with the manual transmission. A classic example is defragmentation.

Fully automatic defrag should, by now, be a foregone conclusion. And yet some enterprises are stuck having to spend countless hours analyzing and scheduling defragmenters (some of which yet call themselves "automatic"). Because many servers must remain up 24X7, scheduling defrag runs has become extremely difficult. On top of that, fragmentation continues to build in between these scheduled runs and hinder performance, and in some cases defragmenters aren't even addressing fragmentation at all. Not only is it like driving a car and having to clutch and shift, it's as if that same car had dirty oil and bad gasoline and was running in fits and starts.

Fortunately one defragmenter, Diskeeper, has leapt into modern times and made truly automatic defrag a reality. With its proprietary InvisiTasking technology, Diskeeper defragments invisibly in the background whenever otherwise-idle system resources are available. No scheduling is ever required, and no negative performance hit ever occurs due to the defragmentation process. Fragmentation is constantly kept in check. And performance is like that of a finely tuned -- and completely automatic -- machine.

Hopefully more such tasks will become as automatic as they should be. In the meantime, make sure your "automatic defragmentation" is truly that -- with Diskeeper.