Data Storage Growth & Capacity - The Major Concerns

LONDON, August 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

The most managed dynamic of any business is and has always been the "speed of process". In the industrial age, speed of process was about mass production. Corporations dictated to consumers, product lines were well defined and there were a lot less to choose from. All consumer information came from either mass media ads or a few friends and family.

The information age turned everything on its head. Now, consumer needs dictate corporate strategy. Choices abound and information sources have grown exponentially.  For example, in 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt reported that Google generates as much information every two days as was generated from the beginning of time to 2003.  

"Speed of process" is now about collecting data and turning it into knowledge. Technology is cool, but anticipating what the public will need and want is what creates profit. Getting there requires a lot of data storage and the technology to access it fast.

A recent survey of IT managers conducted by Diskeeper Corporation revealed their major concern to be data growth and storage capacity. But the underlying situation is not about expansion. It's about the waste of existing data storage resources that requires file defragmentation. The purpose of defragmentation is to consolidate file fragments into a single extent thus increasing access speed and to reduce free space fragments to a small handful of larger chunks. The benefit of defragmentation is reduced I/O overhead and improved operational performance.

SAN technology and Thin Disk Provisioning are prevailing data storage technologies designed to meet the demands for flexibility and cost efficiency. But their ability to efficiently store data is severely affected by fragmentation.  Specifically, information is written to disk in pieces and scattered randomly. But because of the significance placed on space reserved for file extensions, fragmentation results in wasted free space or "disk bloat": empty space that cannot be written to even after defragmentation.  Thus, disks fill up faster with less data and require more frequent hard drive upgrades, more management attention and more downtime. Fragmentation creates greater data response latency, slowing the productivity of a company driven by information. Real world testing has indicated that eliminating or preventing free space bloat can prevent as much as 30% of the disk from being wasted.

Diskeeper Corporation, the creator of the well-known Diskeeper^® disk performance technology software, has been proving the case for more efficient data storage by automatic defragmentation for three decades. Their current version of Diskeeper pushed the envelope far out ahead of current technology by preventing much of the fragmentation before it could happen and also enabling the recapture of bloated free space. The company has revealed the imminent release of a new version of Diskeeper for 2011 that not only prevents more fragmentation than ever before - even on the largest and busiest servers - but also instantly eliminates the rest before it can become a performance liability.

Companies are increasingly squeezed by competitive demands to run on narrower operating margins and process more data - just to stay relevant in the marketplace.