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December 20, 2007

We're Taking A Day Off!

To celebrate the highest revenue year in Diskeeper Corporation's 26 year history, the US offices will be closing in the early afternoon on Friday the 21st, and will be closed for the entire day on Monday December 24th - support services will still be available for respective customers on corporate maintenance plans.

It's been an outstanding year at Diskeeper Corporation, fueled by the hard work of a truly phenomenal team of 200+ international employees. From everyone at Diskeeper Corporation - Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

PS: With the holidays and several key technology shows in early 2008, the Diskeeper Blog will be on a short hiatus until mid January. I will be co-hosting the Computer Outlook Radio Talk Show with John Iasiuolo covering the Storage Visions show in Las Vegas Jan 5th and 6th. For anyone interested in the Stroage Visions topic - consumer oriented digital storage of the future, Computer Outlook is picked up nationally on AM stations in most cities, and (from ComputerOutlook.com) can also be heard streamed over the internet or downloaded as a podcast.

Posted by Michael at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2007

Microsoft and Diskeeper Virtualization Technology Info and Updates

As you may have heard Microsoft released the Hyper-V beta yesterday. You can download a 30-day trial with Server 2008 here. I know that this is "late" by the earliest release date announcements but it is nice to get it ahead of current expectations. Working for a software publisher I can empathize with efforts to predict release dates - it's tough!

Anyway, for us IT geeks, this is a fun way in between (or during) college bowl games to spend some of the holiday weekends - building Server 2008 systems. If you share that twisted idea of a good-time, I also recommend using the pre-configured Server 2008 VHDs located here.

Some time back we posted a Microsoft press release on a virtualization partnership. As part of that announced alliance, we have held regular meetings with Microsoft VPs and PMs (Program Managers) to solve the issue of fragmentation related I/O bottlenecks in virtual environments. Yesterday, a very busy Virtualization Program Manager took time, after working many long days and nights to get the software out the door that morning, to meet with several Diskeeper Corporation tech and executive staff for well over an hour and half. Next year, you'll see some revolutionary solutions from Diskeeper come from this partnership.

We also wrapped that meeting with several other appointments at the Redmond campus with groups such as WHS, the new exFAT file system (in Vista SP1), and Premier Support.

Posted by Michael at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)

Undelete for Windows Vista and Office 2007 is available

There is a new free update for all Undelete 5.0 customers and it is available on your personal "myDiskeeper" download site. An email with specific download instructions has been sent to your registered email address. or you can go here. New customers will automatically receive this updated version of Undelete.

This new release includes support for Windows Vista as well as file version recovery of Office 2007's PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. If you are running Windows Vista, no reboot is needed. If you are running 2000/20003/XP you will be prompted for a reboot, but there is a workaround. Due to particular linking of the Windows Recycle Bin to the user shell, each user that is logged in at the time Undelete is installed will need to first log off and then log back in for Undelete's Recycle Bin replacement called the "Recovery Bin" to kick in. A system reboot may be the easiest way to guarantee this, but for those 24/7 servers, the log-off/log-on may be more palatable.

This release, while seemingly minor requires a major undertaking. Select users have been provided limited release copies of Undelete 5 for Vista. If you are one of those customers and are running 32-bit Windows Vista, I recommend that you upgrade to this new build.

Porting a User-Mode application (e.g. online disk defragmentation) is significantly easier than a file filter driver such as anti-virus software or Undelete. With Undelete, we essentially rebuilt the device driver, making it a more efficient and streamlined program that adhered to Vista's driver standards. So, while the surface layer (i.e. user interface) of Undelete 5 may not have changed, a massive engineering undertaking has taken place that will benefit users on both Vista and other Undelete supported operating systems.

Posted by Michael at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2007

DK'08 Feature Spotlight - VSS Compatibility Mode

Over the coming weeks I'll highlight the new features and explain more about how and why they were developed. I'm starting off with one of the more obscure features which I briefly mentioned last month. This blog adds more information on the relevance of properly supporting VSS.

Let me first start off by defining Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). VSS is a feature first introduced, by Microsoft, with Windows Server 2003. It uses a block-level copy-on-write technology to store the bits of data that changed within a file. Then, at scheduled intervals, it takes "snapshots" of the data on a volume, storing the changes currently held. Unfortunately, without special consideration, defragmentation and VSS aren't very compatible. The issue is described in detail in a Microsoft Support Article.

Diskeeper 2008 has a new (VSS) Compatibility defrag mode. This feature will run a special defragmentation method on Volumes that have VSS enabled. This method defragments the volume is such a way to minimize the FSCTL_MOVE_FILE(mechanism in Windows used by defragmenters)/VSS conflict. During our research and development of this feature we spoke with the Microsoft NTFS and VSS developers. By implementing certain procedures, we ensured we can provide the user the performance benefits of defragments without all the negative overhead on VSS and loss of snapshots of changed data.

So why is this feature important?

If you are running Windows Vista, Windows 2003 Server or Windows Home Server you have the VSS feature. Excess VSS activity due to defragmentation without a VSS-compatible mode, will create overhead on your PC, your network, and possibly conflict with proper use of VSS itself.

WHS will enable VSS on all client systems that it is automatically backing up (does this by default). This can cause extra network traffic as all the VSS changes on the client systems are being backed up to the WHS system. For these cases, we recommend enabling the Diskeeper VSS-Compatible mode on the client systems.

Data Protection Manager (DPM) is an enterprise scaleable version of what WHS does with Vista clients. In this case DPM does this for Server 2003 clients, backing up VSS data from remote servers, across the network, into a centralized storage location.

So, if you're running Windows Vista, Windows 2003/2008 Server, Windows Home Server, or Data Protection Manager, and want to optimize the performance of your drives, Diskeeper's new feature will come in handy.

For those who want to see some technical testing results, we'll have a paper published in our Knowledge Center in the next week or so.

Posted by Michael at 11:13 PM | Comments (4)