New Product Spotlight: Align Your Drives on a Virtual Network with Paragon’s new Partition Alignment Tool

As newer 4K Advanced Format hard disk drives become more prevalent in the virtual environment, partition alignment issues continue to increase in frequency (especially, with machines running Microsoft XP and Server 2003) — and are now permeating the virtual environment. The problem of partition misalignment is that it causes slow write times and inefficient disk operations because the physical and the logical sectors are not aligned. The misalignment causes redundant read/write operations, thus putting unnecessary strain on the hardware. The Paragon Alignment Tool (PAT) ESX version follows on our partition alignment software technology in PAT 3.0, launched a few months ago for consumer products.

PAT ESX was developed to facilitate remote partition alignment of virtual systems. PAT ESX requires minimal virtual disk space (only 3 – 4MB per disk) to perform partition alignment with no need for additional space on the system for snapshots or copies of the processed volume. Should an unexpected interruption occur, the alignment operation can be continued without loss of data or need for restoration.

Click on the image to see a video on Paragon's partition alignment software for virtual environments

With the growing trend in resource consolidation through virtualization, we are seeing significant increases in the number of virtual servers and workstations. Due to the transition of the storage standard from 512B to 4K sectors, the appearance of partition misalignment and performance issues in these systems are increasing. Our customers’ need to resolve these issues is what drove the development of PAT ESX!

The partition alignment software provides easy and comprehensive management for virtual disk alignment operations. Installed on an administrator’s machine within the ESX environment, PAT ESX enables remote access to all virtual disks to check their state and perform alignments in an unattended mode. PAT ESX allows an administrator to browse data stores, select target virtual machines, and then connect to virtual disks to determine whether partition alignment is required. PAT then recommends alignment options if needed.

The Partition Alignment Tool Benefits include an increase virtual machine operations’ performance up to 300 percent, External control, management and alignment of dozens of virtual drives located on different virtual servers (no need to install on every virtual machine); and a decrease hardware costs by eliminating the need to have storage dedicated for migration functions.

To learn more about PAT for ESX, see our press release at Paragon Alignment Tool™ 3.0 for ESX® Now Available for Remote Partition Alignment in the Virtual Environment

A Major Problem With Solid State Drives (SSD)

The Misaligned partitions problem is even more important for SSD drives than for traditional hard disk drives. Many modern SSD drives have an internal memory page size 4096 bytes or larger accordingly to 4K size, which are some analogue for 4K sectors. Thus all previously mentioned problems are the same for SSD partitions alignment.

This issue of SSD misalignment was highlighted in a recent OCZ forum where it was stated:

Take note here, partition alignment with SSD is the most important factor you have to deal with when installing your new drive. Tuning the drive’s alignment can add 30 to 50% more performance so failing to apply the correct alignment could ruin the experience you have with the drive.

There is one crucial SSD issue besides file system speed decline (which is not so noticeable in comparison to traditional HDD). It is the SSD memory cells degradation after some amount of write operations. So if partitions on SSD are misaligned beside downgraded system speed you put your solid state drive in danger. After partitions alignment, PAT eliminates all redundant read/write operations and thus provides speed boost and grants the SSD a longer lifetime.

Is SSD alignment an issue for you? Find out here. Read the rest of Why Misaligned Partitions are a Problem for SSD.

Prepare For A Storage Explosion

We have the good fortune of having opportunities to contribute our insights to readers of popular online editorials like Processor.com. We have been featured by Processor.com for everything from how web development businesses use our products to the challenges to disaster recovery and even the power of partitioning.

This is the most recent article that we were able to contribute to. We were asked to respond to a series of questions related to storage and the growing trend of virtualization.

Read Entire Article

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