Anglo American`s Geophysical Services department has installed Executive Software`s Diskeeper, distributed in South Africa by NT software specialist Server Tools, to manage its growing problem of disk fragmentation under Windows NT.
The department processes hundreds of Gigabytes of geological and geophysical data for companies in the greater Anglo American group. This data is used to map, chart and analyse the group`s environmental projects.
IT manager Chuck Redman says fragmentation impacts the performance of NT workstations by a ratio of four to one, despite Microsoft`s claims that NT is immune to serious disk fragmentation.
"In one instance, we found a newly configured workstation running standard data processing jobs lost three quarters of its optimal performance over a six-month period," says Redman. "Since no configuration or software changes were made in that period, we suspected fragmentation was the cause." Diskeeper restored the workstation and others to their original performance levels.
"Our applications differ from the average business computing model," continues Redman. "We regularly handle data sets larger than 300MB, and our typical workstations process several Gigabytes of data a day."
Because data is disk-intensive, file fragmentation is a constant threat.
Over time, fragmentation increases and eventually slows down the workstation by reducing the amount of contiguous storage space available for new data. "The workstation essentially has to access different parts of the disk to process complete data sets, which is a drain on performance given the size of the disk and the complexity of the data sets," says Redman. "Diskeeper efficiently organises the disk so that data sets are stored together, eliminating the disk access overhead caused by fragmentation."
Geophysical Services` standard image processing workstation is a Windows NT 533MHz DEC Alpha with 256MB of RAM, a CD/MO drive, 27GB of storage and 4GB of software and swap file space. Since data is rarely kept on any one workstation for over two weeks, CD writers are commonplace for offline storage and data archives.
"Considering the type of work we do, it`s imperative we squeeze every last ounce of performance out of workstations," adds Redman. "It doesn`t make sense to use a DEC Alpha processing two billion instructions per second if data comes off the disk at a quarter of its potential speed."
Diskeeper is scheduled to run in the background at off-peak times once or twice a day, depending on the workload of the workstation. According to Redman, because staff have been made aware of the benefits of disk optimisation, the software has paid for itself many times over. "It`s still paying with total peace of mind," he concludes. Server Tools is a subsidiary of Dimension Data.
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