BURBANK, CA — (Marketwire) — 07/13/11 — Where a few years back saving energy was “nice to have,” today it has become critical. Grossly excess carbon in our atmosphere along with dwindling natural resources extracted at spiraling costs have meant that companies, both from globally responsible and corporate economic points of view, have been forced to become very prudent in their consumption of power. Computing resources, consuming a lion-s share of that power, have become a prime target in the hunt for ways to get more done for far less.
Both hardware manufacturers and software developers have responded to these demands. Hardware is closely scrutinized and rated for its energy efficiency, and technologies such as virtualization have gone a long way in accomplishing a greater amount of work than ever before possible while utilizing existing resources.
If not addressed, there is still a factor, however, that results in a high amount of wasted energy. Despite all the many energy-saving innovations in computing, a condition known as file fragmentation, with us as long as modern computing, yet still exists. File fragmentation, originally invented for better utilization of disk space, means that files are broken into thousands or even tens of thousands of pieces (fragments). This condition requires an enormous quantity of extra I/Os for accessing or saving a file — and a resulting quantity of wasted energy for the accomplishment of those tasks.
Defragmentation was once the solution to this problem. But in today-s computing environments, it makes more than defragmentation to address the issue of I/O reads and writes. Interestingly, it is because of the many modern innovations in computing — such as thin provisioning, replication, snapshots, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and deduplication, to name but a few — that defrag alone is no longer adequate. An optimization solution is required to address a broader scope of issues than fragmentation only.
Such a solution does deal with fragmentation — in fact, a majority of fragmentation is prevented before it even happens. But such a solution also increases access times through intelligent ordering of files, and other advanced technologies designed to automatically maximize system performance and reliability. Combined, these technologies fully tackle the issue of read and write I/Os so that a minimal number of I/Os are required.
Proper optimization makes it possible for the many energy-saving advances of computing to be fully effective. For any enterprise focused on energy reduction — frankly, today that means all of us — such a solution is vital.
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