In business, speed is of the essence. He who gets the best product to market, and gets it widely known and accepted before others, wins. This must continue well after a product is released. There is ongoing delivery and servicing of that product, constant improvement, and lastly, the internal processes within a company: marketing, sales, manufacturing, delivery, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc. Those elements combined equal a smooth, fast operation of an enterprise–or the lack thereof.
A cornerstone to every business process is a computer network. To facilitate the myriad of processes, a system must operate as quickly as possible. It must deliver needed files, database records, transactions and perform functions at lightning speed. The faster a system performs, the faster employees get his or her job done and the faster a business will operate. One basic hindrance to computer systems is file fragmentation–a disease common to computers everywhere.
File fragmentation is the splitting of files into pieces (fragments) so hard drive space is better utilized. It is a blessing that became a curse; while it certainly does save disk space, it also greatly slows system response. When a file is requested, individual requests are needed for each file fragment to be accessed. The more fragments, the longer it takes for that file appear on the user’s screen. And the number of fragments can be staggering; numbering in the tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions.
In order to treat this disease and restore speed to the business processes, many companies use defragmenters which gather all these fragments and assemble them back into single files for faster access. Defragmenters were often scheduled to run in off-hours when the least number of users access a system.
Today, scheduled defragmentation has become an inefficient business process itself. The time it takes to schedule robs IT personnel of precious hours needed to perform high-priority tasks. Between scheduled runs fragmentation continues to build, impacting performance–and processes–company-wide.
The answer to restoring performance in today’s computer environments is a fully automatic fragmentation solution, which requires no scheduling. Diskeeper Corporation (www.diskeeper.com) makes one that runs invisibly in the background, using only idle resources so user production is never affected. Maximum computer response is achieved constantly–and eliminates one more barrier to your business processes.