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Of all the computerized activities within a company, backup is probably the most important. Once all the sales are made, the transactions completed, the goods shipped or the services delivered, and the income collected, having retrievable data relating to all of those processes is vitally important for legal, financial and many other reasons. Anything which greatly helps facilitate backups is, therefore, also vital.

Backups can be hindered by a number of factors, but prime among them are those dealing with file read and write I/Os. In the backup process, an entire data set needs to be read, and then copied elsewhere. This data set could be spread across one volume or many. If a high number of additional I/Os are required to read files before they are transferred, backup speed is heavily impacted. At best, the result is a backup that is greatly slowed down, and at worst it is a failed backup.

The additional I/Os are needed when files are split into multiple pieces, called fragments. Fragmentation is the condition in which pieces of individual files and free space on a disk are not contiguous, but rather broken up and scattered around the disk. It is not at all uncommon to see a file fragmented into thousands or even tens of thousands of fragments. The impact on backups of files in such a state is considerable.

Due to the advanced complexity of today’s backup solutions, simple defrag is no longer adequate. As traditional defrag has become outmoded, today a majority of enterprises address such issues with Diskeeper® performance software.

“I noticed on my backup server it took about 14 hours to back up the data for the week,” stated Dusty Bailey, Network Engineer, Z Capital Partners. “After finding Diskeeper, which I now have used for over 3 years, on everything, I have saved so much time, and I don’t have to worry about any slowdowns of the servers or workstations. It also freed-up my weekends. The 12 terabyte backup server is totally defragmented, the 14 hours for backing up the nine servers went from the 14 hours to 10 hours. It has 15, 1 terabyte drives, so yeah, a noticeable difference in using Diskeeper.”

Jimmy Beltran, Lotus Notes Administrator, SandvikSIT Americas further stated, “We are running Diskeeper Enterprise Server on our Domino Lotus Notes application and also on the mail servers. We are running these across several RAID 5 arrays encompassing over 2.75 terabytes of user data. It used to take us 25 hours to perform our weekly backup of the Domino Servers. By using Diskeeper, we were able to reduce our backup time down to 9 hours.”
Diskeeper performance software, going well beyond defrag, includes IntelliWrite® technology which prevents a majority of fragmentation before it ever happens. To round out a full optimization solution, Diskeeper includes I-FAAST® technology, which accelerates file access times to up to 80 percent faster to meet the heavy workloads of file-intensive applications. Diskeeper also contains advanced network management capabilities and critical system file protection. Diskeeper’s proprietary InvisiTasking® technology allows all Diskeeper tasks to be performed automatically, in the background.

An additional bonus is that because of the mechanical movements eliminated with Diskeeper, disk drive life is also increased by 50 percent or more.

With Diskeeper employed, backups complete in a timely manner and cease to fail because of I/O bottleneck issues. It is part and parcel of any total enterprise backup solution.