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July 14, 2006

Who uses Diskeeper?

Apparently a lot of people do!

Diskeeper recently surpassed the 20 million licenses sold mark.

-Paul

Posted by paul.shomo at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2006

Diskeeper and Linux

A reader (Mike from NCL Worldwide) responded with a question on Linux to my In the Oven blog. I felt this was an really interesting question and deserved added attention, hence this article.

Here's the basic question he asked:

Do you have any plans for supporting linux systems, ie, Fedora Core 4 (which we are experimenting with here). We are attempting to go web-based within our intranetwork for data entry, etc.. And if we switch to linux servers fully (we have one how that we use as an SQL server) I would be very interested in a defragger program for them.

For his full question, read his response in "In the Oven".

Read on for my response...

Yes we are certainly investigating Linux. A few challenges lie in front of us to address, but we are working towards resolutions. We've built prototypes over the years for Linux and Mac (OSX).

One challenge is supporting, and keeping up with, the many flavors of Linux operating systems and more so, their file systems -from Reiser to EXT2/3, etc... - a good overview of file systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system

The other hurdle is integrating defragmentation into kernel level code. With Microsoft we accomplished that by co-developing an API so defragmenters could act as user-mode apps, greatly simplifying the defrag app and making it far safer and reliable for online operations. This can certainly be done in the Linux world, but it is a bit of a challenge.

The last hurdle is one that seems to be working itself out, and that is where does Diskeeper make its money - unless we can convince our developers to work for free ;-). Linux is, of course, open-source and technically "free" - though you pay for other things like support, etc. In the past it has been less accepted to "sell" software in an open source space. Business models are often different in this market. I believe that the open-source arena is more adapt to support software sales at this time, and we can always explore other revenue models.

That said, I strongly anticipate we will be in the Linux space and a contributor to its progress.

digress: As a general statement, Diskeeper is becoming more active as a partner in the software/hardware world. We've had alliances with Microsoft for a long time, but are adding more partners and actively pursuing contributing to industry consortiums and the like. I strongly believe that the collaboration these groups offer gives customers/users the best options and technologies, and we want to do our part.

As for Linux defrag products, I don't know of any at the moment. I was aware of one other company offering a beta for Red Hat EXT2 several years ago, but as EXT2 faded from prominence, that product seems to have faded as well. EXT2 has some freeware (one I remember testing included a use-at-your-own-risk clause from the developer!). EXT3 may have one by now -last I looked the consensus was to revert to EXT2, use a freeware tool and then revert back.

If you do a search, you'll likely come up with a lot of freeware products -just be cautious. Personally, I'm not an advocate of using freeware on a business machine. On my home PC, on my own time and with a reliable back-up; maybe.

Posted by Michael at 02:27 AM | Comments (0)

Diskeeper 10 betas for Vista

We will be releasing a new build of Diskeeper 10 to support the latest Vista build later this week or early next.

A few testers have written in with comments on where to get support or report issues.

While we aren't supporting this in the typical sense (providing a quick bug fix), we do want to incorporate solutions as we progress with our beta releases for Vista. That said, please send your comments/issues to FieldTest@Diskeeper.com. Our Beta Project Manager will get the data over to our developers for resolution in a future release.

My apologies on the Blogging hiatus, we've been very busy. We are in the midst of wrapping the next new Diskeeper (very exciting) which we expect to launch later this year - i.e. before Vista.

We are still looking for a few more RC (release candidate) testers for that release. The offer is open to existing Diskeeper customers. If you're interested, email the same address above and write in the subject line you wish to test. I also recommend providing contact data, including company name and phone numbers and if you are a volume license customer or a home user (so we can provide the proper software to test). If you have a customer ID from a past purchase please add that as well as it streamlines our review process for admission to the test program. We do have limited openings so please understand that we cannot accept all requests.

Also note that the RC testing is very, very short (only a few days). We send out what is essentially a final product, and are looking primarily for "marketing" feedback and maybe some fine-tuning. It does require you answer some survey questions. Other than the short time frame we require, our testers have noted they really enjoy the ability to test our software and provide us feedback.

Posted by Michael at 01:51 AM | Comments (8)