Condusiv Expands Architectural Transformation

Over the last few months, Condusiv Technologies has steadily transformed its performance optimization technology.

The company is familiar to the channel and IT professionals first as Executive Software, then as Diskeeper -- in both cases, the company that provided the disk defragmentation software included for years with shipping copies of Windows. Historically, Condusiv's predecessors have earned their revenues by upselling fuller-featured desktop defragmentation software, as well as selling server disk defragmentation software.

But following a leadership change in late 2011 and a company name change to Condusiv in 2012, the Burbank, Calif.-based company has been rearchitecting the products. Condusiv's latest products emphasize I/O optimization inside the server, ordering the bits into more easily stored and accessed chunks before they're written to disk rather than trying to reorder the disk after the data's been scattered across it.

The first fruits of the new approach came in V-locity 4, released in December. That product attacks the problem on virtual systems -- an environment where it is especially helpful to organize the data before it leaves the virtual machine since it will generally share disk space with the output of other virtual machines. The V-locity brand has been around for a few years, but prior to Version 4, the tool handled optimization at the disk level rather than before it came out of the OS.

Now, Condusiv is releasing the technology in another way. While V-locity is intended for virtual machines, Condusiv on Monday released V-locity Server for physical server environments. In short, the product handles the I/O optimization on a physical server before sending it to the direct-attached storage or to the NAS or SAN. Condusiv positions V-locity Server as especially well-suited for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server systems, as well as other applications that throw off a lot of I/O.

The V-locity products include two main components that each tackle different problems for I/O-intensive applications. IntelliMemory caches the most active data in the server's memory to prevent many I/O operations from occurring at all. IntelliWrite short-circuits Windows' tendency to split files into multiple pieces for I/O and instead stitches them back together before they can be written to disk in widely varying locations.

In an interview, Robert Woolery, senior vice president of product marketing and management, said the new Condusiv products provide better optimization performance than the company's previous disk-side defragmentation and I/O optimization software. He said there is no tangible, additional benefit to running V-locity products in conjunction with the disk-side software like Diskeeper Server.

Woolery said Condusiv delivered the virtual server version earlier because of market dynamics.

"The footprint is enormous on the physical side, but the momentum is on virtual servers and we expect to sell more licenses on the virtual side," Woolery said.

In either configuration, Condusiv also offers a component called the Benefit Analyzer, which helps the company make a guarantee that it encourages channel partners to use as a selling point. The Benefit Analyzer is self-auditing benchmark software that provides customers with a before-and-after performance comparison. Since February, Condusiv has been offering money back for customers who don't see at least a 25 percent performance improvement, and that guarantee stands for V-locity Server too.

According to Woolery, Condusiv continues to see customers getting a performance boost of about 50 percent, making the 25 percent guarantee an under promise/over deliver proposition.

In the meantime, Woolery contends the 50 percent performance optimizations can add up to big savings in the right circumstances.

"If customers are looking at their environment, and concluding they've got to buy an additional hundred servers at $10,000 per server, that's $1 million to refresh the environment," Woolery said. "If you load our software into your servers, you can increase the performance by 50 percent and use that $1 million for other purposes."

Posted by Scott Bekker on April 22, 2013