Fully Automatic Defrag Makes the Most of Virtualized SAN Environments

BURBANK, CA--(Marketwire - April 9, 2009) - It's a fantastic thing when two relatively new and revolutionary pieces of technology can be combined to substantial benefit. Such is the case with the combination of SAN and virtualization. SAN technology releases server power and network capacity back to the production environment, keeping storage as a separate, efficient operation. Virtualization makes it possible to reduce a SAN footprint by 50 percent or more and fully utilize existing hardware resources.

A number of hardware and software manufacturers are now offering virtualized SAN solutions, allowing companies remarkable scalability within existing resources. The smaller footprint is also allowing companies to utilize data replication and disaster recovery solutions that were previously impractical. Yes, this combination is definitely a win-win situation.

There is one underlying factor that can greatly impede a virtualized SAN environment however, and that is file fragmentation. When numerous virtual machines are all utilizing the same set of hard drives, fragmented data on those hard drives will heavily impact performance on every virtual machine. In this specialized environment, another ramification is greatly slowed backup and recovery procedures, affecting the entire enterprise.

Because virtualized machines must always be maintained in a high-performance state, the hardware layer "feeding" them must always be defragmented. A virtual machine has its own I/O request which is relayed to the host system. This means that multiple I/O requests are occurring for each file request -- minimally, one request for the guest system, then another for the host system. When files are split into multiple fragments (fragments numbering in the thousands are not at all uncommon) it means numerous I/O requests for each fragment of every file.

Periodic defrag, such as with scheduled or manual utilities, cannot possibly keep up. Fragmentation is constantly being created, and in between runs continues to impact system performance and reliability. Additionally, virtual environments can rarely be taken down for maintenance so scheduling is difficult at best.

For virtualized SAN environments, the only real answer is the Diskeeper® defrag solution. With its proprietary InvisiTasking® technology, Diskeeper software defragments in real time, consistently, utilizing only otherwise idle resources. Files at the hardware layer in virtual environments are maintained in a fragmentation-free state -- meaning that performance and reliability are constantly maximized. Virtual machines always perform at their best, and backup and recovery speeds are consistently as fast as other parameters will allow.

SAN and virtualization are a match made in heaven. The best possible wedding gift for each such system is Diskeeper software's fully automatic defrag.