Product Reviews

Executive Software had a mixed reception on its last visit to Enterprise. Although its Diskeeper 8 disk defragmentation suite offered superb features, the Administrator component suffered from a false start and rough edges. Another year goes by and it's back again with many faults remedied.

Administrator doesn't provide any defrag tools and is designed purely for remotely managing installations of Diskeeper Professional and Server, plus looking after defrag schedules on multiple systems. No doubt the biggest change to Administrator is the fact that it's been completely rewritten using C#, and now uses a SQL database to store client data. Also, whereas the previous version could only pull job data from managed clients, the latter can now push this data to the system running Administrator 9. There's much more as it can now be managed using more than one console and even supports multiple database instances as well.

Installation is nicely streamlined. Administrator can use an existing SQL 2000 database or will offer to download and install MSDE 2000 from the Diskeeper website. Administrator still comprises two components. The Data Controller service looks after schedules, logging, reporting and alerting information, and the Console provides management access. The main interface is substantially different to its predecessor and far better designed, making it easier to use. The Getting Started page provides quick links

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to all the main tasks, and from here you can view the network and gather your client systems into groups for easier management. As before, you can select individual systems or groups and deploy the various Diskeeper products to them using the PushInstall feature. However, this requires file and print sharing or remote administration enabled on XP client systems, which the new Windows Firewall in Service Pack 2 blocks by default. Furthermore, additional DCOM restrictions in SP 2 also affect Administrator's polling, scheduling and refresh capabilities. You can either turn off the firewall or modify its settings using the supplied scripts, and deploy them via an Active Directory (AD) group policy - tedious, but necessary.

Groups are created from AD objects or workgroups and administrative access must be provided for all of them. You can then schedule defrag tasks to individual systems or groups, choose the target drives and decide on the schedule frequency. Administrator still isn't aware of available drives on each target and simply provides an alphabetical list of drive letters for making multiple choices, or the option to select or exclude all mounted volumes. The schedule offers plenty of options for regularly running Diskeeper, or you can use the SmartSchedule feature. This keeps track of the number of files moved each time Diskeeper is run and dynamically alters the schedule as required. Diskeeper on a client can also be remotely controlled from Administrator, and Server 2003 is now supported.

This version of Diskeeper Administrator is far superior to its predecessor. The new interface is more intuitive, and it still delivers the best disk defrag features available. However, you might want to check out Winternals Defrag Manager (www.winternals.com) first. Although it doesn't offer the same level of features as Diskeeper, this uses less complex agent-based technology for client access and can be easier to deploy in a networked environment.