Free Defragmenter: For the Enterprise?

When most people buy a large-screen TV, they usually do so in an effort to bring the experience they might have in a movie theater to their homes. And bringing it home is usually somewhat of an event: everyone plops down on the couch, perhaps popcorn is made, and the new acquisition is fired up. Everyone waits...and there it is! The giant, lifelike crystal-clear picture that everyone wanted!

But something is wrong. While that picture is amazing, it is accompanied by sound that is tinny and has no depth at all. This is because the family, in their rush to expand their home entertainment experience, didn’t stop to think that you not only see great things on such a television, you also hear them. Now all they have for sound is the tiny free built-in speakers—never meant to be a high-quality sound experience matching the picture. If they’re going to really do it right, they’ll need to go back out and get a good quality surround-sound system.

Moving over into the field of computers, a similar thing could be said about a free or included defragmenter. A computer system in an enterprise is robust, can store and retrieve millions of files, and can serve them up quickly from servers to users near-instantly. High-tech innovations such as SAN, NAS, and virtual machines are consistently brought on board to increase that experience and functionality.

File fragmentation, however, can slow that experience and functionality to a crawl. In order to address it, an enterprise-ready fragmentation solution needs to be brought to bear. If not, fragmentation compounds unchecked—and all of its symptoms such as slow performance, unexpected hangs and freezes and reduced hardware life continue unabated.

Much like the tiny speakers were never meant to provide a true home theater experience, the free defragmenter was never meant to address fragmentation on an enterprise level. It must either be run manually or be scheduled—neither of which are options in today’s enterprise, with servers that must remain up and running 24/7.  Additionally, it will be found that this defragmenter does not have functionality to keep up with the hectic rates of fragmentation found in today’s business environments. 

The only true solution for an enterprise is one that prevents a majority of fragmentation so that it never impacts the system or users. It never requires scheduling or any kind of intervention from IT staff—which leaves them free to address more urgent priorities. Best of all, maximum performance and reliability are assured.