Alan:  If you have a business you know that everything revolves around your computer systems.  If you want to keep your computers running at their optimum, you are going to have to do some kind of maintenance.  What kind of maintenance is best? 

 Our guest today is Mark Harrer, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation.  Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Mark.

 Mark:  It’s good to be back.

 Alan:  We can look at our computer systems just the same way that we look at our cars.  If you want to get the maximum performance out of your car, you are going to have to do maintenance.  If you have a car and you never change the oil or never rotated the tires or did any other kind of maintenance, there is going to be a point in time where things just don’t work the way they used to when the car was brand-new. 

 It’s the same thing with a computer system.  You are going to have to do some kind of maintenance, aren’t you, Mark. 

 Mark:  In fact, one of the things that we do with different products is we do is we actually offer what we call a “maintenance agreements”, or maintenance for our customers.  What that allows them to do is it allows them to keep their software current and up-to-date.

 For example, you would never run the same 5 quarts of oil that you got when you drove your car off the lot.  The same thing is you need to keep your software up-to-date with new features, new functions that are there.  And that’s one of the advantages of maintenance. 

 Alan:  I know you have your award-winning software – your Undelete 2009 and now your Diskeeper 2010 and those are great for maintaining our system, but how do you work with us in maintaining those?

 Mark:  Well, our Diskeeper is a defragmenter software so it actually keeps your drive and your computer defragmented, which keeps it maintained while Undelete reads deleted files and it captures them and it does that. 

 Where the maintenance actually comes into  play is that when we come out with new versions, which have new features and new functions fairly frequently.  When we come out with a new version of Diskeeper, customers will a lot of times want that new version. 

 Now, if we have our customers on maintenance, what that entitles them to do is one,  it entitles them to support.  If they have any questions; problems with product and if they don’t know how it works, that does give them access to our support departments. 

 Also, what maintenance allows them to get new version of the product.  So by paying that maintenance fee, which is less than actually repurchasing the product from scratch, it allows them to upgrade to the newest and greatest version of our product or with the features that are provided with that. 

 Alan:  It is said that software is always a “works in progress.”  There is no absolute software that is going to be working all the time.  You are going to have constant updates because hardware is being updated all the time.  It’s kind of a tossup, which is going to be updated faster, the hardware that you have on your computer or the software you need to keep it running.  You’ve got to keep both of those in synch, don’t you?

 Mark:  A perfect example is this.  Diskeeper has been around for years.  I’ve even run into some customers have said that, “I’m running your Diskeeper Version 9 and what we want to do is we are putting it on a Windows Vista system.”

 Diskeeper works sometimes in these environments, but you know that when you’re updating the operating system you do need to upgrade your software, as well.  When we wrote Diskeeper 9 for example, Windows Vista wasn’t even around, so we can’t necessarily leverage or make sure that the product works for an operating system that just didn’t even exist. 

 So by having software maintenance, what it allows you do is allows you to automatically upgrade to the latest and greatest version, as we do this.  We are continually upgrading our software; we are continuing improving it.  As we find ways to improve it and make it run and perform better, we are adding new features and functions to each subsequent or upcoming new version of the product, as well.

 Alan:  And this really becomes important say for a small office or a small business because they really don’t have time to check for updates.  They really don’t have time to make sure they have the latest software, installed on their computer systems.  They are too busy trying to get their job done. 

 And when it comes to a large business, you are going to have multiple computers; you are going to have hundreds and any time that you install new software or you put new hardware into a computer system, you are going to have changes. 

And sometimes software and hardware just do not play nice together.  And that’s where a maintenance agreement really becomes important. 

 Mark:  A good example is to take computers now, vs. where they were over three years ago or five years ago.  Now you are starting to see drives now in the 3 to 5 terabyte or even larger drives.  One of the things that we do with Diskeeper, for example in or latest version is we have improved our defragmentation engine.  We have even added our Enterprise Server product that has our type defragmentation engine and what that does is to optimize for drives over 4 to 5 terabytes and to move the files that are typically on drives of those sizes.  You will get the benefit of having constant and more efficient defragmentation, which you wouldn’t have with our other products. 

 Another good example would be a product we have which is called Hyperfast.  Now, you are starting to see more computers come out there because the technology has changed with solid-state drives, the SSDs. We actually have a product called Hyperfast that if you get Diskeeper with Hyperfast, it will actually go in and it will optimize the solid-state drive, which is something that defragmenters of the past wouldn’t do. 

 Alan:  This is why it’s so important to stay up with the times and not have to worry about what is the latest software version.  You have it so that as soon as we turn on the machine, it goes out and checks all your new software and sees what needs to be updated and downloads it and installs it for us. 

 Mark:  When you install a product, it will actually see if you are running the latest version.  If it isn’t it will allows you to check it as well.  We also have different point release with improvements as well as major releases that will allow you increase the number of features and functions. Having access to our software maintenance and it allows you to get those features and functions, without having to repurchase the software from scratch.

Alan:  Does this maintenance agreement cover all of our computers, our servers, our workstations and is this for all of your products?  How do we get started?

 Mark:  It is a maintenance agreement.  We usually have it for our larger customers.  The maintenance fee does entitle them to upgrades and support on all of our products.  What we do is when they order the products, because we do it electronically.  We do keep track of how many versions they have. Because having that maintenance will entitle them to upgrades of the software, whether it be Undelete, whether it be Diskeeper or whether it be V-locity or whatever the product it has to be.

 Alan:  Mark, where would you say the breakpoint is when say from a small business to a corporation as far as when they need to buy a maintenance agreement?

Mark:  I would say probably anywhere from maybe the 3 to 5 to 10.  If they are talking to their sales rep and they are buying from a sales person directly, talk to the sales rep, because the sales rep can actually go over there and kind of help them say where the breakpoint is and where it would more advantageous to them. 

 The nice thing is with maintenance, as long as you’re covered under maintenance, you can get the upgrades, regardless of where it is or where you are during the process, which is nice. 

 Alan:  A maintenance agreement is a wonderful thing to have so that if you do have a problem you can just pick up the phone; call someone and they can kind of walk you through what the problem is.  In a small business or even in a large business, when a computer is not working the employees say, “Well, this is great.  Now I can take a longer coffee break or extended lunch or something like that.” 

 However, from a CEO’s standpoint, or the President of the company’s standpoint, when the computer goes down that’s ca ching, ca ching, money coming out of his pocket, isn’t it?

 Mark:  Right.  They do have access to our support folks, as well.  In fact, since I do support the volume license customers, I work very closely with all of our reps. If you do have problems, it does entitle you to that phone support, as well. 

 Alan:  If I run into a problem, what is going to be the turnaround time?  I know that with some companies you call up and you will get a recording that says we will return your phone call within 2 business days.  Or you have to leave an email and they respond back to you by email in a couple of days.  “A couple of days” to a business – they could be out of business!

 Mark:  We are located here in Southern California and we know that we have folks here from 6:30 am all the way until 5:30 pm Pacific Standard Time.  We do want to make sure that we are covering all areas.  If it’s overseas we do have folks who handle support there, as well.  A lot of my support questions, I am giving immediate support.  I have people calling me, directly; also if the sales person calls me and they will patch me in, immediately so they are able to get an immediate response to the issue. 

 Alan:  Mark, along with your Undelete 2009 and your new Diskeeper 2010, you have a product called V-locity. What exactly is that?

 Mark:  What the V-locity product does is it is very similar to Diskeeper but it’s designed for the Windows 2008 server with HyperV for VM machines.  A lot of times in a virtual environment, when you guests and hosts operating systems, when you have something running in the guest operating system, a lot of times it won’t communicate what it’s doing to the host operating system. 

 With certain programs such as defragmenters and anti-virus software, if you are running those within a lot of the guest virtual machines, it can take away the resources from the host, without the host knowing from where those resources are being taken.  

 So what V-locity does is if you are running Windows 2008 server with HyperV, it actually has a guest module that you put within the guest operating systems and yet the host module and what V-locity will do is it will allow you to go ahead and have the guest and host operating systems communicate with each other so we do not consume or use any resources unnecessarily on the host operating system. 

 Another feature of what V-locity will do as well is we have the ability to do what’s called a “compaction of a guest virtual machine,” using the graphical interface.  One of the things that you will run into is suppose you have a virtual machine guest operating system that is taking 10 Gigs of space.  You go ahead and you set up that dynamically so it can expand as your company grows. 

When it grows from 10 Gig, let’s say to 30-Gig and in same area suppose you delete a bunch of files and it goes back to 10.  Well, the problem you run into is if it’s dynamic, it usually expands outward, but it doesn’t expand inward. 

 So if you have a 10-Gig operating system that has a 30 Gig footprint and you have about 20 Gigs of unused space that’s taking up space.  So one of the things that we can do compaction tool is you can actually bring that virtual machine offline and compact that image to make it a little more efficient. 

 Alan:  Because having a maintenance agreement – if you are going to be going virtual, that is very important because there are so many gotchas when you start going virtual that you don’t really look until you try bringing all these machines up.

 Mark:  Right.  And what we’re finding is more and more companies and corporations are going virtual as part of the green initiative and also just from a cost standpoint.  It saves on electricity costs.  They don’t have to have a room of 20 servers; they can one server and then 20 virtual servers underneath that.  It cuts down on space; it cuts down on heat; cuts down on power.  It is pretty much what more and more companies are going toward virtualization.

 Alan:  The virtual environment is nothing more than a machine that is running physically with multiple large files that are kind of like a virtual drive but in this case it’s a virtual operating system and if any one of these virtual environments is using up resources, everything goes down, doesn’t it?

 Mark:  And that’s the thing, so when it’s communicating it is going to go ahead and take it so it is communicating between the two so that the hosts will know not to be consuming all these resources that there are there, as well. 

 Another thing to keep in mind is for defragmentation, what you do is you have fragmentation within the operating system on the guest operating systems, this also gives you the ability to have a host module that defragments those files.  Because if you look at those machines, really all they are, is very large files that are there.  They are running within the host operating system. 

 Alan:  When you have a virtual environment, you are going to have large capacity hard drives and you’re going to have a lot of memory because that’s what you want to have and a lot of CPU processing because that’s what really makes a virtual machine work.  But if you’re files are scattered all over the large hard drive, everything slows down to a crawl. 

 Mark:  Yes, the hard drive is the slowest part of a computer and if that drive needs to go and look at all the different areas to retrieve that data it is going affect the performance of it.  The same thing as defragmenting is it’s compounded on the host environment. 

 Alan:  There is a big plus side for virtual environments.  Before you had like 4 or 5 servers and more than likely you had UPSs on every server; you have a separate power supply or even multiple power supplies in each one of the server boxes; you have memory in each one of the server boxes.  And of course, you have separate hard drives in each one of the server boxes.

 Here you have a one large capacity server that’s going to be running full-time, full-speed and you have to make sure that this is properly maintained.  It’s like a racecar that it is designed to go flat-out and if you don’t take care of it, it doesn’t go flat-out.

 Mark:  In a lot of the servers that I have seen, in a lot of the server room, in addition to saving power, saving on the hardware, having hardware that can fail, having multiple hard drives and memory and computers and that, as well – space is a limitation.  I’ve seen a lot of these server rooms where there is no more room to put extra servers in there.  So, virtualization – in a lot of times in these environments is the only answer. 

 Alan:  I’ve seen some of these ISPs that have so many servers in them that the cooling costs in overhead in the actual running of pipes underneath the floor to cool the server room, they could do away with a lot of that by going virtual. 

 Mark:  They can.  It will save on the electricity; it saves on the pipes.  Not only do you make things green, but from an economic standpoint, it’s a good move and that’s why more and more people are moving to that. 

 Alan:  In order to get started using your Diskeeper 2009 and your new Undelete 2010, can we go to the Website and download a copy?

 Mark:  We actually have trial versions of all our products, of V-locity, Diskeeper, and Undelete.  The Diskeeper and V-locity Trialware can be downloaded at http://www.diskeeper.com.  The Undelete can be downloaded from http://www.undelete.com.  What’s important is the version that we have are not crippled in any way.  So if you want to upload our defragmentation software, it’s a fully featured version for 30 days.  We don’t cripple it or do anything of that nature. 

 In the Undelete product the only thing you don’t get in a Trialware version is you don’t get the Emergency Undelete and it is for 32-bit only with the Trialware copy that’s there.  Besides that it has no limitations.

 Alan:  You also have a program on your Website called DPAN that will allow a business to put this software on our machine to tell us where our bottlenecks are and how to prevent them.

 Mark:  What DPAN does is it is a very good tool.  Suppose you’re in a company where you have 100 or 500 or even maybe 5 or 10 machines.  What you can do with DPAN, which stands for our disk performance analyzer for networks. 

 What it will do is that once you own the product, you can go ahead and scan all the computers on your network.  It will actually give you a status of the amount of fragmentation on those computer, regardless of whether Diskeeper is installed on that computer or not.

 You will look at that scan and say, “Oh, wow! I have so many of these machines are this fragmented, so many are this fragmented.”  So you can actually see how bad fragmentation is on all the computers on your network.

 Alan:  Just having access to people like yourself that are very knowledgeable about what’s going on with your computer system; what’s going on with the software - that’s worth its weight in gold right there!  So, you are very familiar with the operating systems and how the software interacts with it.  That’s what the maintenance is all about, isn’t it?

 Mark:  A lot of our support includes not just supporting people with Diskeeper but supporting people on their other computers.  For example, a lot of them run into other issues with the computers that we get calls on, as well as sometimes there could be some other related problem with their computer where they thought maybe the issue was Diskeeper, but it wasn’t.

 I know that I’ve been in the industry for at least 20 years.  We have a very extensive training program that we do for all of our support staff, here.

Alan:  If we do have a problem can we pick up the phone and get someone on your level; we don’t get the person that was just hired last week?

 Mark:  In fact, before we even have people on the phone answering calls they do need to go through some training.  I know that when I came onboard I had a lot of experience in the computer environment on the networking side, but I had to actually go through training on all the products – Diskeeper; Diskeeper Administrator; Undelete – all of these products that are out there before they even had me picking up and answering phone calls. 

 Alan:  Corporations are very picky as far as somebody telling them, “What you really need to do is reformat your computer.”  That’s not an answer.  They want to know exactly what to do, what button to push, what registry setting to change and get back up and running and in business, don’t they?

 Mark:  Giving them the wrong answer is a lot of times worse than giving them no answers.  We are very careful on what we do there.

 Alan:  Mark, it’s been our pleasure to have you as our guest here on Let’s Talk Computer and look forward to talking to you again real soon.

 Mark:  I look forward to it.  Thank you for having me on your show.