Michael Materie
Diskeeper Corporation

Due to the significant complexity and breadth of the software and hardware used in modern storage environments, from disk-level technologies to massively scaleable network storage facilities, there are many myths and misconceptions regarding the continuing need for disk defragmentation. Although it is understandably easy to accept many of them as replacements for file/disk defragmentation as many seek to solve the same issue, the fact remains that the disk is the weak link. The purpose of this paper is to define the technologies, how they contribute to I/O throughput, and how the various new solutions can work together with defragmentation for optimal disk subsystem performance.