Category: Storage Management

The real news this past week out of EMC World is not that EMC has decoupled its VMAX or Symmetrix controller heads from its back end disk drives, added some bells and whistles to it and called it “VPLEX”. The big news in my mind is that this decoupling puts the storage industry on notice that EMC has officially begun its transformation from a disk vendor into a provider of storage intelligence.

2009 is shaping up as the year of server virtualization. The hype around Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server is giving way to the reality of companies actually virtualizing their production servers as a means to improve energy efficiencies and slash infrastructure costs. But as companies virtualize these servers, many are leaving the familiarity of direct attached storage (DAS) and entering the world of networked storage for the first time. This is creating new challenges, especially for Windows servers using utilities such as defragmenters that will begin to operate on virtual machines (VMs) and defragment each VM’s associated file system.

In the computer industry, Diskeeeper is as synonymous with disk defragmentation as Microsoft is to Windows. In fact, any knowledgeable Microsoft Windows administrator knows that defragmenting a disk drive can provide application performance boosts of up to 176 percent, if you believe some reports. That makes Diskeeper a must-have in the eyes of some shops with performance intensive applications running on Windows servers. However as more enterprises virtualize their servers and disk drives, how does Diskeeper’s technology remain relevant? To get some answers to these questions, I recently spoke to Derek De Vette, VP of Public Affairs for Diskeeper Corporation.