Disk File Optomizer - Futures

[Rene Rodrigue]

Does anyone have any information on the future of DFO. We are currently running Diskeeper, but started evaluating DFO purely from a cost perspective. Does anyone know if there is ongoing development for DFO? Anyone had any recent experiences with engineering support or any recent information from product management?
Looking to make an informed decision.
Thanks, Rene

[Jon Pinkley]

Rene,

What types of ongoing development do you mean?

This is mostly speculation, but I would doubt that any VMS defragmenter is going to have significant ongoing development other than to support new features of VMS. For example, I would expect the "big three" to make any changes necessary to support 2TB volumes when those are supported, but I doubt you will see a lot of new features in any of the products. The VMS market is not expanding, many of the VMS specific products are in "assisted living" mode, although it isn't to the "hospice" model yet.

The safe approach is to choose the product based on its existing feature set. If you can't live with that, then don't buy it with the expectation that it will be added.

P.S. the big three I am referring to are in alphabetical order:

DFO, Diskeeper, PerfectDisk.

Jon

[Hoff]

DFU, too. Nowhere near the feature level of the previous three mentioned, but free.

[Rene Rodrigue]

Hi Jon:
Continued support of new drives as they come to market is probably the main concern. I recognize DFO is much like DECnet IV and V. They have been for a long, long time mature products with only support being added for new nics and hardware, unlike TCP which has had IPv6 etc. added to the mix. While no products future is ever certain, I would prefer not to change platforms, even at a cost savings, if there was any possibility of that product being discontinued anytime soon. At the end of the day, its probably best to stay where we are. Thanks, Rene

[John Gillings]

Rene,

With newer storage technologies it's getting fairly difficult to describe what a defragger actually does.

Further, the price of disk space, and the significant increase in the size of storage volumes has led to MUCH larger cluster sizes (two decades ago a cluster size of 3 blocks was typical, now it's often in the hundreds of blocks), means that even if contiguity makes sense at the platter surface, for many files, it's simply not possible for them to be fragmented because they're smaller than the allocation unit.

I'm take a really good look at what your defragger is REALLY doing for you, other that checking a box saying "yes we have a defragger" and sucking up resources shuffling blocks around.

If you really want to cut costs, NO defragger at all is obviously the cheapest!