Market researcher IDC has released its latest figures on worldwide server sales, and they indicate that businesses are starting to increase spending on their IT infrastructures. IDC's numbers showed that revenue from servers in the fourth quarter of 2009 declined 3.9% year over year to $13 billion, as shipments rose 1.9% to 1.9 million units. The fourth quarter was the second consecutive period of quarter-over-quarter revenue growth, and driving the increase was a rebound in spending on volume servers, particularly x86 machines.
In a statement, IDC analyst Matt Eastwood said that "market conditions improved significantly in the fourth quarter as the marketplace transitioned from recent stability to growth in several critical server segments."
We've seen this trend in the server defrag area as well. Many large businesses appear to be on the move in their infrastructure buildup. And accompanying their server acquisitions is a high interest in server defrag, whether vSphere defrag, defrag Hyper-V or even SQL defrag as they look for SQL server performance improvements.
IDC's rival Gartner has similar numbers, with Gartner predicting a return to shipment growth this year in the middle or high single digits and revenue growth at a slightly lower level.
Server growth is upon us -- get your server defrag ready.
A week ago I had the opportunity to speak at the VirtG Deep Dive in Waltham, MA. The Deep Dive is a day long event focusing on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization solution. My topic was the impact of file and free space fragmentation in a virtual environment.
The effects of fragmentation in a Hyper-V environment can be more profound than they are on a stand-alone physical server. Hyper-V performance suffers because there is fragmentation on the virtual guests and fragmentation on the host. This can result in I/O contention between the virtual guests, and between the virtual guests and the host. There is a finite amount amount of resources available and excessive I/O in the virtual guests or on the host due to file and free space fragmentation can stress the system. This is why it is necessary to defrag Hyper-V on both the virtual guest and the host ends of the system.
Hyper-V, or any virtualization platform for that matter, takes steps to provide good performance. However, if a virtual guest generates unecessary I/O, the impact will be felt by the rest of the system. Defrag reduces I/O loads and minimizes I/O contention between virtual guests and the host. Hyper-V performance monitoring indicates that defragmenting the guest and the host reduces the total number of I/Os on the whole system. Defrag, along with free space consolidation, should be part of of any Hyper-V performance-tuning efforts.
My presentation at the Deep Dive was well received and there were a lot of questions afterward. Several attendees indicated they thought fragmentation could be part of their Hyper-V performance issues. I told them to defrag Hyper-V on a regular basis to get the most from their virtualization investment. Defragmenting host and guests should be part of any Hyper-V performance tuning best practices. Of course, I had to tell them the best defragmentation came from PerfectDisk.
The effects of fragmentation in a Hyper-V environment can be more profound than they are on a stand-alone physical server. Hyper-V performance suffers because there is fragmentation on the virtual guests and fragmentation on the host. This can result in I/O contention between the virtual guests, and between the virtual guests and the host. There is a finite amount amount of resources available and excessive I/O in the virtual guests or on the host due to file and free space fragmentation can stress the system. This is why it is necessary to defrag Hyper-V on both the virtual guest and the host ends of the system.
Hyper-V, or any virtualization platform for that matter, takes steps to provide good performance. However, if a virtual guest generates unecessary I/O, the impact will be felt by the rest of the system. Defrag reduces I/O loads and minimizes I/O contention between virtual guests and the host. Hyper-V performance monitoring indicates that defragmenting the guest and the host reduces the total number of I/Os on the whole system. Defrag, along with free space consolidation, should be part of of any Hyper-V performance-tuning efforts.
My presentation at the Deep Dive was well received and there were a lot of questions afterward. Several attendees indicated they thought fragmentation could be part of their Hyper-V performance issues. I told them to defrag Hyper-V on a regular basis to get the most from their virtualization investment. Defragmenting host and guests should be part of any Hyper-V performance tuning best practices. Of course, I had to tell them the best defragmentation came from PerfectDisk.
A couple of weeks ago I looked at part of Computerworld's Forecast 2010 Special Report. Today I'll look at another part of the report -- Supersized Servers and the message that "virtualization will hit a hot streak in 2010, and enterprises will order more systems fully loaded with maximum processing power, memory and I/O capabilities." In question after question in Computerworld's study, virtualization, and particularly server virtualization, came up big:
- #1 of Top 5 technologies most likely to be the target of spending increases in 2010: Servers
- #1 of Top 5 project priorities for 2010: Server upgrades, virtualization
- #1 of Top 5 most promising new technologies for respondents' industries or organizations: virtualization
- #1 of Top 5 technology areas for beta testing: virtualization.
As organizations look to virtualizatoin to handle more, they also need to look at virtualization performance. And one key aspect of virtualization performance is defragmentation, including Hyper-V defrag and vSphere defrag. As important as we feel defrag has always been and continues to be for physical servers, it's as least as much with virtualization, as organization look to improve vSphere performance and Hyper-V performance. If all that power in those new servers is not allocated properly, much of it will be wasted. Only with a technology such as PerfectDisk's Virtual Awareness can the power of a busy virtual server be fully harnessed. Without virtual awareness, even the biggest and most powerful servers can waste a lot of resources, spinning its wheels, so to speak. Virtual awareness ensures perfect communication between the host and all its guests.
Maximize virtualization performance with enterprise defragmentation -- with virtualization smarts.
The entire Computerworld article, by Robert L. Mitchell, is here.
Matthew McDermott is a principal consultant for Catapult Systems and a Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Matthew writes about SharePoint and Microsoft technologies related to collaboration, web content management and productivity. Catapult Systems is a national Microsoft-focused IT consulting company that provides application development, enterprise solutions and infrastructure services.
A recent blog post by Matthew, entitled Hard Disk Optimization on Hyper-V, relayed his recent experience with PerfectDisk to support his SharePoint 2010 demo environment. In order to support this environment, he used Hyper-V, and realized that he had some pretty big VHDs. Not that the large VHD files were a problem, but he wanted to optimize his disk environment. He chose PerfectDisk "because they have a comprehensive suite of options that cover every platform that I use (Windows 7, Windows Server, Hyper-V and Windows Home Server). One brand to cover all of your options, I love it."
McDermott writes about his experience and thoughts on PerfectDisk for virtualization defrag with Hyper-V, Windows Home Server and the Enterprise Console. He sums it all up with his "proof," which included a boot time defrag to obtain "the best possible defragmentation." Stating that he has "very simple requirements, make my drives smaller and don't impact performance." PerfectDisk delivered, allowing Matthew to recover 58.4 GB of disk space.
There's more, including "the aftermath." You can read about the follow-up and the entire exercise here.
And defrag hard disk the MVP way.
In a report by editor-at-large Charles Babcock, Information Week recently reported on IBM's plans to bring the virtual machines of multiple vendors under one management umbrella called IBM VMControl. The new VMControl is due out in December, and no, it won't include any defragmenting PC or server defrag software. But, from a single management console, it addresses a new data center reality - VM sprawl (as opposed to the old physical server sprawl).
So it is with the approach we are taking with PerfectDisk as we move beyond hard drive defragmentation to the new virtual world. We've certainly learned a lot and continue to learn since we started moving in this direction. We've built up our virtualization expertise and continue to do so, both internally and through alliances and partnerships outside Raxco.
On the data center side, PerfectDisk has evolved from its initial ESX offering to more comprehensive solutions for the new vSphere 4 as well as Microsoft's Hyper-V environment. This is in addition to our disk defragmentation tool for VMware Workstation and VMware Server. Now, through the PerfectDisk 10 Enterprise Console, this more heterogeneous environment can be managed and controlled, and there will be additional capabilities added with PerfectDisk 11.
In his article, Babcock reports numbers in the 60% - 80% range for IBM customers using multiple hypervisors. The trend is clear for this still-evolving world of virtualization, and it carries over to virtualization defrag as well. The data center is moving well beyond a simple server defrag. Physical and virtual servers need to be addressed, as do guests and hosts, and all from multiple vendors. With our patent-pending Virtual Awareness technology, we're working hard to build on the foundation we've started, and move forward with our customers, as their virtualization partner.
To help manage the sprawl.
With our recent announcement of support for vSphere 4, PerfectDisk now provides unparralled support for vSphere defrag. VMware has received a great deal of interest with this cloud operating system, as its battle with Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix' XenServer and others shows no sign of abating, but only intensifying. While auto defrag is a key element of any solution for a virtualization defrag tool, any defragmenter program that fails to address the unique complexities of a virtual environment will come up short.
Because vSphere 4 is able to manage large pools of virtualization computing infrastructure, including hardware and software, its overall performance is critical to organizations implementing it. This is one area where a defragmenter program can help. And with its ability to defrag seamlessly in a vSphere environment, providing the patent-pending Virtual Awareness defragmentation that eliminates resource contention and ensures efficient use of resource, PerfectDisk 10 vSphere ESX delivers.
Time to defrag VMware environments like you mean it...with true integration.
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