Some Things Just Can't Be Scheduled

Posted by B. Boyers on Thursday, July 17, 2008 - 02:03 pm:

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Let’s assume you have a warehouse full of flammable materials. The warehouse is equipped with a fire-control system with sprinklers in case of fire, and the assumption by everyone who works there is that, if a fire breaks out, the system will react and the conflagration will be extinguished. What nobody knows, though, is that the warehouse manager, in a misguided attempt to save money, has rigged the fire control system so that it only goes off if a fire breaks out during certain times, such as between midnight and 6 AM. If a blaze occurs at any other time of day, it will simply continue to burn until midnight when the fire control system kicks in.

Let’s also add another variable: Let us say that a policy has been implemented whereby the fire control system schedule must constantly be re-set, based on times that fires have erupted in the past. It then becomes somebody’s job to constantly update this schedule—somebody who has another job altogether that suffers because of this. And on top of that there are times—such as peak hours when the warehouse is very busy—that the fire control system cannot be scheduled at all.

Such a thing would never happen, of course. But on a lesser scale, a similar scenario happens each and every day with file fragmentation on computers. File fragmentation is something that never rests; when a computer is in use and files are being created, modified and deleted, fragmentation is occurring on its hard drive or drives. As it occurs, it slows down performance by causing extra I/Os for every file request. If an enterprise has employed a scheduled defragmentation solution, fragmentation is only addressed at a certain time of the day, and in between those times fragmentation continues to drain performance. This is especially true with today’s large files and high-capacity drives. The bottom line: scheduled defragmentation is no longer keeping pace.

Additionally, IT hours are precious, and the scheduling of defragmentation robs valuable time from more important tasks. And to add even more complication, an increasing number of sites are running 24X7 and times to schedule defragmentation so that it won’t impact users on the system are becoming few and far between.

The only real fragmentation solution for today’s demanding computer environments is one which is fully automatic. This solution works invisibly in the background, utilizing only otherwise-idle resources, so that there is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation. Scheduling is never required, so there is never a worry as to when it must occur, and IT hours can be spent on more important tasks.

Your warehouse would have a fire-control system that would operate whenever there is a fire. So should your computer systems have a fragmentation solution that operates whenever there is fragmentation—which is constantly.