In today's computing environment, uptime is a critical factor. This is because information technology has slowly crept up from the supporting position it had years back—suddenly we look up and IT is not merely enhancing business operations, it in itself has become business operations. When a customer is placing an order, it is directly or nearly directly with a computer. When a shipment is received by a customer, the receiving signature is scanned and receipt is immediately confirmed through a computer. Messaging, quotes, accounting, inventory—they're all done straight through automated systems that cannot afford downtime.

Now that so many servers are “front and center” and must run 24X7, time to perform tasks such as anti-virus, backups and defrag has become incredibly scarce. So scarce, in fact, that some sites put off defrag until performance is absolutely intolerable and the only choice is to bring a system down and run a manual or scheduled defragmentation.

Disk fragmentation occurs when a file is broken up into pieces to fit on the disk. Because files are constantly being written, deleted and resized, fragmentation is a natural occurrence. When a file is spread out over several locations, it takes longer to read and write. But the effects of fragmentation are far more widespread: Slow performance, long boot-times, random crashes and freeze-ups — even a complete inability to boot up at all. Many users blame these problems on the operating systems, when disk fragmentation is often the real culprit.

In the context of administering computer systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation in file systems. It does this by physically reorganizing the contents of the disk to store the pieces of each file close together and contiguously. It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmenters also try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence.

Jim Bernal, Senior Network Engineer with Howe Barnes Hoefer & Arnett in Chicago, Illinois, found out just how bad it can get. “We constantly had servers running slowly and getting really fragmented from constant file access and over time file access would almost halt or take minutes to access a file,” Bernal said. “We also had problems with users logging in with domain controllers sometimes rejecting users because of timeouts in communicating with our DNS servers.”

Like many sites today, Bernal's company was running the whole gamut of services and applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, fileservers, domain controllers, print servers, Terminal Services, Live Communications servers, accounting software, SharePoint and Virtual Services servers for virtualization.

But also like many sites, Bernal's fortunately discovered Disk Defragmentation. Only a high quality disk defragmenter utilizes only otherwise-idle system resources, so defrag takes place whenever and wherever possible. There is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation, and no scheduling is ever required. Performance is always maximized, so systems can remain up and running.

Today, taking your systems down is the same as taking part of your business down. Therefore it is always well said that its better to take care of your servers & systems before the problem becomes incurable. So go ahead & download your copy of a free Disk Defragmentation Software.