Defrag: Are businesses in the dark?
SINGAPORE--Enterprises in Asia are not defragmenting their systems because they do not understand enough about the technology, according to a senior executive at Diskeeper.
John Lake, executive vice president of new territories at Diskeeper, told ZDNet Asia that businesses in Asia seldom or never defragment (or defrag, for short) their machines. Companies in Europe and North America also face a similar problem, Lake said, at the sidelines of a media briefing here last week.
In a fragmented file system, free space is not properly utilized as files or data in the disk are not contiguous and are broken up into pieces and dispersed. Defragmentation is done to reduce the amount of fragmentation, typically by reorganizing the data so that files are placed closer together creating more free space.
Lake said: "Here, in Asia, it's true [that not many companies defrag their systems], and it's not because they don't need to, or they don't want to… They just don't understand [the technology], and that's our challenge--to educate the market."
"At [the] corporate level, well over 90 percent [of businesses] just don't have any enterprise solutions. There might be individual users within corporations [who] have defragmentation solutions in place, but not throughout the enterprise," he said.
According to Lake, the Asia-Pacific region accounts for less than 1 percent of Diskeeper's overall sales worldwide. He added that Japan currently leads in the adoption of defragmentation in the region.
"[Business users] are aware that they've got problems…on their systems, but they don't associate it with fragmentation," Lake said. And while most know what defragmentation is, "to some degree or another", he added that users prefer to resolve the issue by purchasing a new hard drive or reformatting the hard-drive instead.
"They don't understand the mechanism of exactly what's happening," he said, noting that the solutions these companies implement do not solve the problem completely and merely "band aids" that work "for a little while".
Fragmentation occurs as soon as the operating system is installed, so choosing to reformat or purchase a new hard drive could worsen the problem, Lake said.
He added that some systems will be affected by fragmentation more than others, depending on the user's usage. For instance, systems that run on Microsoft Windows "always has fragmentation", and defragging the system can improve its performance and keep it running at peak performance.
Diskeeper offers Diskeeper 2007, available in five versions--Professional, Pro Premier, Server, EnterpriseServer and Administrator--which the vendor says are designed specifically for enterprises and offer defragging tools. These products also feature InvisiTasking, which enhances OS multi-tasking to ensure maximum server performance and zero resource conflicts for real-time defragmentation, and Terabyte Volume Engine 2.0 (TVE), which allows fast real-time defragmentation of large data volumes, of over 60GB.