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The life of IT staff in the Education sector is so often focused on squeezing every last drop of life out of every hardware and software project. You need to run lean and mean, and simply can’t afford indulgences or risky ventures. However, the challenges you face are no different than the corporations you pass by on the way to work every day.

A recent study at the Trinity School in New York City exposed the overwhelming amount of data that the typical institution has to manage. Trinity has seen staggering increases in data as they have moved to offer 24/7 online access to information for their students and teachers. Schools are simply no longer 9-5 operations. Implementing an automatic defragmentation solution saved the school significant expenses on new hardware and freed up IT to focus on progressive technology projects.

The demands at Trinity School are likely similar to what your IT team is challenged with; leveraging what you have to accommodate every increasing demands.

If a PC could run in production for 5 to 7 years, that will offer tremendous flexibility to the IT budget. After all, the users are running the typical office apps, and they ran fine on those new PCs several years ago. Unless there is a new critical program that requires quad core CPUs and 3GB of RAM, those older PCs are capable of getting the job done.

The only problem with PCs that have been in production for a while is they will be more prone to problems that require Help Desk involvement, i.e. maintenance and repair.

Windows IT Pro published an in-depth study that showed just how much impact fragmentation has on the typical productivity apps and PC use. The longer a PC is in use the more severe accumulation of fragmentation your users, and ultimately you, have to deal with.

Looking at the results, teachers, students and administrative staff that expect a Word document to load quickly can wait as long as 50.9 seconds. That’s a long time to stare at an hourglass, and is the kind of performance impact that often leads to a Help Desk call. Automatic defragmentation keeps file access optimized, so those users get consistent peak performance, lessening demands for “faster computers” as their answer for their performance problems.

Fragmentation affects the servers just as much as the PCs, if not more so. Servers host data that multiple users, maybe hundreds, need access to. The hardware is more powerful, but the demands are far greater.

Fragmentation is a file system consideration. NTFS sees a fragmented file and issues extra I/Os to retrieve the data.

As an example that every school or university has to deal with, increases in retained data are translating to ever increasing backup time requirements. The problem is that as backup programs have to read files, when fragmentation is involved, it adds extra time to the process. IT staff have used Disk Management Software to shrink back up times from 16 hours to less than 4 hours.

Colleen Toumayan is the Vice President of Public Relations at Diskeeper Corporation. With over 31 million licenses sold, home users to large corporations rely on Diskeeper software to provide unparalleled performance and reliability to their laptops, desktops and servers. Diskeeper Corporation further provides real-time data protection and real-time data recovery

• Return-on-Investment From Automatic Defrag - December 21st, 2008
• Automatic Defrag: Saving Hours of it Time - December 18th, 2008
• Handle Fragmentation to Mitigate Performance and Reliability Risks - October 23rd, 2008
• The Need to Minimize Maintenance Operations in Healthcare - October 20th, 2008
• Lack of a Data Protection Plan: Vulnerability For Any Business - October 15th, 2008

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