Reponse and apology from Diskeeper Corp
I’m the VP of Product Management at Diskeeper Corporation and would like to hopefully clear up some confusion.
First off I must apologize to HP and the knowledgeable and ethical employees of HP. Any inferred assertion that HP as a company, a great partner of Diskeeper Corporation, is misleading customers is very unprofessional and simply inaccurate. Corrective actions are already underway within Diskeeper Corp so that this does not occur in the future.
It is not the view of Diskeeper Corporation that HP, or any other SAN vendor, has any responsibility to educate their customer about an issue that is not of their causing.
Therein lies what may well be a misunderstanding, which the representative from HP is helping correct.
SAN solutions can employ proprietary block or file management systems, and fragmentation can occur at this level, the same as it can in the operating system’s (e.g. Windows) file system. HP is making it clear they do not have this particular issue in their SAN.
Our expertise and solutions are designed exclusively to optimize performance of a general purpose operating system. The HP rep stated this on the subject:
“A defragmentation application, such as the one your message referenced [Diskeeper], provides a contiguous file reappearance to previously fragmented file systems. This works well with the EVA platform – just as with other platforms or LUNs in general.”
and...
"For sequential data accesses, defragmentation can help to increase performance – especially when combined with sophisticated techniques that the EVA provides."
Due to our poor communication, there’s been a great deal of unwarranted controversy generated between vendors, readers, and the media when the vendors actually AGREE that defragmenting the OS file system(s) is a good thing!
For your time and attention to this, my apologies to HP, Chris Mellor, and readers of The Register.
Michael Materie
Diskeeper Corporation