Defragmenting Mirrored Drives

[Andrew_271]

We use HP OpenView Storage Mirroring to mirror two 2-terabyte volumes to our remote site on a DL380 G4 Storage Server.

We have had it running for 3-4 years,. and have never defragged either. We are thinking of buying diskeeper 2009 server.

Is this recommended? Any reason for or against third-party defrag solutions, or any suggestions in general? Thanks.

[Steven Clementi]

Andrew:

No experience with it, but understand that any changes to the source file system ... will likely be replicated to the target system. I would think that you would only need to do this on the source system, if at all.

Steven

[Uwe Zessin]

Watch out - Storage Mirroring is not a 'block replicator'. You can tell it to replicate single folder hierarchies. It taps into the file system and replicates a file's changes of byte ranges.

If you defragment the source volume, you will not implicitly defragment the destination volume as with a block replication mechanism.

[Andrew_271]

Thanks. I planned to buy a copy for each server (source and target). Diskeeper runs as a service and auto-defrags when system resources are under a certain threshhold.

Any issues with running software like this?