"Yes, We Do Need Fragmentation Prevention!"

BURBANK, CA--Once upon a time there was a company just like yours. Despite tough times, they managed to keep business going, their bottom line improving, and between money they had saved and their good credit managed to obtain a brand new computer system. It had lightning-fast servers, cool new desktop systems for the employees, a high-bandwidth network and the latest in peripherals. Additionally, there was a Storage Attached Network (SAN) for data security and fast retrieval, and virtual machine technology to help make the very most out of resources.

The company executives made one mistake, however: in the course of the purchase, despite the IT staff clamoring for it, they nixed the purchase of a robust third-party fragmentation solution, insisting that the built-in defrag solution would suffice.

Initially, performance of the system seemed fine and hummed right along. It wasn’t long, however, before the helpdesk phone starting ringing with complaints of slow performance. At first they were isolated—but then they increased. Each and every one of those complaints had to be chased down, and they all basically led to nowhere except fragmentation. The IT personnel made notes to “schedule the defragmenter” but given their overly busy schedules the time was never available for it.

Not far down the road, additional complaints started coming in of “unexplained” process hangs. Again, the IT staff knew what was behind the problem, but did what they could to optimize the processes when possible, and made yet another note to “run the defragmenter” in time that would never materialize.

The symptoms that the IT personnel knew stemmed from fragmentation only worsened. There were crashes where there shouldn’t have been. Hardware was failing before its time. Virtual machines were performing poorly, and the SAN was not delivering the speed that had been promised for it.

Finally, one morning, the IT director came in to find that last night’s backup had failed. At this point, she had had enough. She went to the executives that had stopped the purchase of a robust fragmentation solution, and explained to them that a modern company such as theirs had to have a fragmentation solution that would keep up with all the latest in technology that they were running. It had to be fully automatic, so that scheduling didn’t have to be done. It had to constantly address the fragmentation problem so that it was never an issue.

The IT director then explained that there was even a solution that prevented a majority of fragmentation from ever occurring—and the price of the solution would be a fraction of the costs they were already being incurred by IT staff constantly tackling fragmentation-related issues.

Finally, the executives understood. "Yes," they said. "We do need fragmentation prevention!"

And the company had maximum performance and reliability ever after.