Return-on-investment (ROI) means a lot to companies, especially in economically turbulent times such as these. When an organization invests in a piece of equipment, a new advertising campaign, a property or even an employee, they are very carefully monitoring the money made back to cover the outlay and provide profit as well. Anything that doesn't fit these criteria is quickly cut loose.

Because a corporation invests so heavily in IT, a sharper-than-normal eye is kept on ROI from that quarter. Expenditures for hardware (which can be especially costly), software, programming and maintenance contracts must show substantial returns to receive approval from those ever-watchful bean counters.

One basic factor that can cut straight across the ROI for all of the above is file fragmentation. It greatly slows system performance, which impacts the return for software, hardware, virtually every employee and the company itself when it cannot deliver products and services in a timely manner. It impacts IT because they must chase and "put out fires" rooted in fragmentation. And it also impacts hardware life; a disk drive that must work many times harder to retrieve file fragments, can wear out as much as 50 percent faster.

While many may know that defragmentation boosts performance for all employees and increases computer life, they may not know that it takes the right defrag technology to actually do so.

The defrag technology in common use is scheduled defragmentation. At the time it was invented, it was a significant advancement; prior to scheduled defragmentation, it had to be performed manually during off hours by a live human. It had to be performed during off-hours because the defragmentation process would negatively slow down performance for any users on the system. Scheduling meant that defragmentation could occur unattended during times when computers weren't in use. Now, however, "times when computers aren't being used" are becoming few and far between as many shops remain operational 24X7.

But the problems don't stop there. Scheduling itself must be done by experienced IT personnel—personnel that are now in short supply and under heavy demand. The time spent analyzing and scheduling defrag on the many drives throughout a corporation cuts heavily into ROI potential.

The most significant factor, however, is the fact that scheduled defragmentation is no longer fully performing the function for which it was designed: fully defragmenting the drives and allowing full performance potential to be realized. Because file sizes and disk capacities have grown so dramatically, fragmentation continues to build in between scheduled runs. That means it is still slowing performance and decreasing hard drive life—and decreasing ROI all across the enterprise

For real ROI from defrag, a company needs to turn to an automatic solution such as Diskeeper® software with InvisiTasking® technology. Because it is fully automatic, system performance is maximized. Only otherwise-idle resources are used, so there is not a negative performance hit from defragmentation. Since scheduling is never required, IT hours can be spent elsewhere where they will obtain the highest return. Hardware can achieve its expected lifespan and beyond.