Diskeeper Warns the Industry about the Pitfalls of Server Virtualisation.
Diskeeper Corporation Europe, a provider of automatic disk defragmentation, is warning the industry about the rarely discussed pitfalls of server virtualization. A newly released Diskeeper whitepaper entitled, Virtualisation and Disk Performance, details how the industry's movement towards virtualisation is making the mechanical disk drive an even weaker link by consolidating I/O through this key performance bottleneck.
With the recent explosion in storage capacity, the industry has begun to feel the growing disparity between high performing CPU and memory speeds and sluggish disk I/O. Server virtualisation exacerbates this bottleneck by layering host and virtual file systems, creating layers of file fragmentation within fragmentation, and funneling I/O requests through common I/O channels. Diskeeper's new whitepaper discusses the many ways virtualisation ties server throughput more closely to the lagging disk I/O speeds.
With disk fragmentation being a major contributor to decreased file system performance, automatic defragmentation should be a key piece in any virtualisation strategy. In today's environment, it's important to defragment drives more frequently, ideally daily.
Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.diskeepereurope.com/assets/_pdf/en/whitepapers/virtualization_and_disk_performance.pdf
Taken from Information Security Bulletin.