Planet Technology

The typical state or local government organization is on a never ending IT budgetary ‘diet’. It is hard to get the necessary hardware, software and manpower needed to meet expectations, and those expectations are the same as a for-profit business. To say IT is "spread thin" is literal. There is a good chance that the systems you manage span across a city, a county, or even the entire state. There’s an even better likelihood that you cannot staff each office with IT personnel.

A problem begins to cost more when on-site visits are required. The time to get it resolved is increased, which means more time from resources in an understaffed IT department that are not working on proactive initiatives.

It’s fairly well known that defragmented files mean faster file writes and retrievals, however file fragmentation, if not handled, will build up to the point that reliability is jeopardized. The principle of fragmentation’s impact on system or application reliability is the timing-out of a requestor (e.g. the application) or service provider in collecting/reassembling fragmented data. A good overview of the affect of stress when requesting file objects comes from a Microsoft Knowledge Base article (317249) which states:

"The Server service cannot process the requested network I/O items to the hard disk quickly enough to prevent the Server service from running out of resources." The end result is a program that freezes, hangs or crashes. When noting issues of stability or reliability, disk fragmentation can be viewed as the proverbial "straw that broke the camel’s back." That fragmentation is the cause or these problems is hardly black-and-white, and it may appear that the computer is simply "possessed." The reliability of third party applications is highly dependent on the degree to which those applications can accommodate bottlenecks, such as in disk subsystems.

Chances are you spend holidays on system maintenance, maybe install a few patches, upgrade some software, replace a hard drive, reboot a server, etc.

And… with offices often spanning large geographical areas, it isn’t always feasible to staff an IT administrator at every location. On-site support visits are costly and time consuming. A further IDC study showed a Diskeeper® customer that had numerous satellite locations was able to eliminate 17% of their on-site visits to those remote offices by automating defragmentation.

With limited IT staff, you need solutions to be just that – solutions. Every tenured IT pro has horror stories about the "can of worms" project that ballooned out of control and ended up causing more havoc that the initial problem it was supposed to address.

Michael Materie, Director of Product Management at a company renowned for its automatic defrag solution noted an interesting phenomenon. "Government organizations operate on limited fixed budgets, so we regularly see initial interest in our product for the ‘squeaky-wheels’ – the computers that generate the most complaints. However, the most substantial benefits are realized once the IT group has integrated our defrag product on every computer they manage, thereby effectively removing fragmentation issues permanently across the entire network."

With full network-wide deployment, fragmentation is eliminated as a variable, predictably making troubleshooting other issues faster and easier to resolve.