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 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.
I won't add to the barrage of articles, posts and more reviewing 2009 that list the the top stories of the year. But I did want to touch on 2009, from our perspective, as a supplier of a disk defragmentation tool that has evolved and continues to evolve with the times.
2009 brought the reality of a deep recession and tough times for many technology companies; there was Windows 7, Chrome, Bing, more mobile action. But 2 big areas that also stood out, and which helped us grow this year, was the increased movement towards virtualization and big growth on the storage front. Virtualization has been taking hold for awhile now of course, but the tough economic environment has accelerated its growth. For many companies, the potential savings realized from virtualization are too hard to ignore. And that's why our vSphere defrag and Hyper-V defrag solutions are resonating with users. Virtualization defrag with virtual awareness such as that provided by PerfectDisk allows organizations to maximize their investments in virtualization and help realize its benefits. Without proper management and resource control, virtualization efforts can fall short.
Storage was another big segment in 2009, with people and companies buying increased amounts of storage and different types of storage, including SSDs, as prices plummeted. Data requirements continue to expand, with new applications and lots of video driving demand. And cloud-based storage was another key driver.
These were the biggest factors (there were others) behind the growth of defragmentation utilities this year, even in a down economy. Individuals and companies looked for savings, and the result was an investment in infrastructure and certain types of software. Virtualization defrag and vSphere defrag to better manage the virtualization movement. Efficient hard drive defragmentation to control the storage explosion.
All wrapped up in the PerfectDisk family of defragmentation utilities.
There are a few questions that often come up with regards to the PerfectDisk virtualization defrag solutions in the vSphere/ESX environments, versus the standard PerfectDisk server defrag.
1. What does PerfectDisk 10 for vSphere offer that PerfectDisk 10 Server does not?
Or in other words, what's the difference between performing a Windows Server 2008 defrag (or earlier server versions) and a virtualization defrag? There are various differences but the following two key points summarize the major points:
A. The vSphere-specific product offers an exclusive, patent-pending feature called "Virtualization Awareness" that allows file system optimization to take place without the contention for resources that normally takes place with automatic background defragmentation. This ensures that optimizations run dynamically without supervision or intervention, while never negatively impacting performance. It also offers integration features for VMware's vCenter and support for vMotion.
B. Licensing for the vSphere product is offered per physical host with volume pricing. This means unlimited Client/Guest licenses are provided once the physical host is licensed. This also means no consideration as to the number of Guests or even the number of CPUs needs to be taken. In the example of a vSphere environment with 10 instances of ESX Server 3.5/4.0 running, that would equate to 10 licenses of "PerfectDisk10 vSphere."
2. Does the vSphere product perform defragmentation on the ESX layer / VMFS? Does it install on the ESX Hosts or just the Guests?
No. VMFS does not support external file system optimization. Installation does not take place on the physical ESX host, a small agent is instead installed on each Windows based Guest.
3. Is any modification of the vSphere environment required in order to use PerfectDisk 10 vSphere?
No. The use of PerfectDisk10 vSphere does not require any modification to your existing configuration.
Smarter. Simpler. Priced for today's world.
The PerfectDisk 10 Enterprise Console has been updated to Build 127. This latest build provides enhanced support with a VIM plug-in to VMware vSphere Client 4.0 plus a few bug fixes.
The vSphere plug-in allows users to access the PerfectDisk 10 Enterprise Console directly from within the vSphere Client, providing a single point of management for their vSphere-based Windows guests. Using the PerfectDisk Enterprise Console plug-in, users can easily deploy, configure and schedule PerfectDisk, allowing for enhanced disk space management in vSphere environments, for vSphere defrag.
You can “Check For Updates” under Help in the PerfectDisk console, or wait for Autoupdate.
Get news like this earlier — follow PerfectDisk on Twitter.
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.
Continuing PerfectDisk’s pioneering role in defragmentation for virtual environments, I was happy to announce support for VMware vSphere 4 in the latest PerfectDisk 10 build. We’ve established a great relationship with VMware over the past few years, and as part of this we continue to evolve our support for VMware offerings. Whichever side of the ESX/Hyper-V — or others — debate you come down on, we know defragmentation of these environments is an important piece of getting these systems running at peak performance and efficiency, making the best use of resources while eliminating resource contention.
Upon release, VMware dubbed its vSphere 4 as the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service, and bringing cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary way. As the leader in virtualization defrag, it’s a natural for PerfectDisk to lead the way in support for vSphere 4 and vSphere defrag.
Head to the clouds, and remember to defrag -- virtual defrag.
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