Diskeeper Takes Shot at I/O Latency, Even in the Cloud

Enhanced I/O has become something of a Holy Grail among vendors who are attempting to sell products that optimize virtualization and cloud environments, and users, who are fuming over low sub-par network performance penalties. Enter Diskeeper, with its V-locity 3 Virtual Platform Disk Optimizer, and "invisible background optimization."

Diskeeper portrays itself as a "virtual doctor" that alleviates latency pains induced by constricted I/O bottlenecks, sluggish VMs, laggardly migration, resource conflicts, unfulfilled storage capacity, and woefully slow backup speeds.

Via its V-Aware technology V-locity 3 detects external resource usage from VMs and eliminates host server resource contention. For example, its CogniSAN technology detects external usage in shared storage environments such as SANs, which are frequently reviled for their negative impact on I/O. V-locity overcomes this liability by allowing "transparent optimization by never competing for resources utilized by other VMs over the same storage infrastructure."

The product is fully integrated with VMware ESXi and also supports ESX, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V. It further features an automatic space reclamation function, which zeros out unused data blocks on virtual disks, enabling virtual disk compaction.

Diskeeper, which has been around since 1981, claims to have 96 percent marketshare. According to product manager Damian Giannunzio, "We run the show because we innovate."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 11/01/2011 at 12:48 PM