The banking and finance industries are so competitive that every penny is pinched, counted and still expected to provide high returns. Not only is spending scrutinized, but you have to deal with stringent data security and regulatory compliance guidelines. And at the end of the day, IT has to provide the business superior performance. While speed is certainly important, reliability is critical. User's experiencing applications that hang or freeze can easily cause the loss of customers and business.

It's fairly well known that defragmented files mean faster file writes and retrievals, however, file fragmentation, if not handled, will build up to the point that reliability is jeopardized. The principle of fragmentation's impact on system or application reliability is the timing-out of a requestor (e.g. the application) or service provider in collecting/reassembling fragmented data. A good overview of the affect of stress when requesting file objects comes from a Microsoft Knowledge Base article which states:

“The Server service cannot process the requested network I/O items to the hard disk quickly enough to prevent the Server service from running out of resources.”

The end result is a program that freezes, hangs or crashes. When noting issues of stability or reliability, disk fragmentation can be viewed as the proverbial “straw that broke the camel's back.”

The reliability of third party applications is highly dependent on the degree to which those applications can accommodate bottlenecks, such as in disk subsystems.

Fragmentation affects the servers just as much as the PCs, if not more so. Servers host data that multiple users, maybe hundreds, need access to. The hardware is more powerful, but the demands are far greater. Waiting for data is bad enough when the end user's is staring at an hourglass, but it's even worse if that employee is engaged with a customer, because now the customer has to wait as well.

An International Data Corp (IDC) study of Renasant Bank interviewed James Hayes, IT Manager, who noted that “Customers were always impatient when they had to wait more than a few seconds, and the tellers would note this impatience.” The last thing a customer wants to hear from a teller or service representative is “sorry for the wait, my computer's is slow.”

Automatic defragmentation keeps file access optimized, so those users get consistent peak performance, and customers get the rapid service they expect. With such heavy competition in the banking and finance industry, quality of service can be a major competitive advantage.

The days of 9-5 have long since past. Customer's demand access to their finances 24 / 7 / 365. And when those customers log in they are accessing data on company servers.

Michael Materie, Director of Product Management at a company renowned for its automatic defrag solution noted an interesting phenomenon. “Customers expect to be able to access their accounts any time – day or night. There is no such thing as off-hours in that business. Customers don't like to log in and discover the computers are down for maintenance. That is why we evolved a technology that can take care of your server every time of the year. We understand that there is no window of time that can be relegated to computer maintenance activities like defrag.”