Product Reviews

Had Executive Software got this product right in its first release, you'd have been reading this review a few months earlier. However, when we originally tested the new Diskeeper Administrator utility, we reported enough bugs for the company to advise us it had decided to withdraw it from sale while it fixed them.

Administrator is one of a huge raft of products released by the disk defragmenter specialist at the end of 2003 and the new and confusing range includes Home and Professional for non-networked and networked users, while businesses get Standard, Advanced, Data Center and Web options for the Server version. Diskeeper Administrator is designed to provide a centralised console for deployment, management and monitoring of the Professional and Server utilities - a function previously offered in a more basic form in earlier Server versions of Diskeeper.

Administrator comprises two main components - a Data Controller that looks after schedules plus logging, reporting and alerting information, and a Console that provides management access - and these can be run on separate systems if required. The Console interface is a tidy affair: you start by browsing the network and creating groups of discovered systems, and plenty of choices are available. You can organise your systems by Active Directory objects and domains or custom groups, although for the latter the creation method is unnecessarily

You'll also need to create separate groups for receiving either Diskeeper Professional or Server. From the PushInstall option, you can elect to load or remove Diskeeper from selected systems, pick the version you want to deploy and preset the Smart Schedule option. Introduced in version 6, the latter feature is used to determine the best times for defragmentation, as it keeps track of the number of files moved each time Diskeeper is run and dynamically alters the schedule as required. You can also select a system and remotely control the Diskeeper software. However, it was disappointing to find this isn't supported if the Administrator has been installed on a Windows Server 2003 system. We also found that you need to regularly run a full refresh on the device tree to update the icons showing which systems have the various versions of Diskeeper installed.

Disk defragmentation tasks may be scheduled and applied to multiple systems simultaneously. You simply select the individual systems or groups from the device tree, choose the target drives and decide on the schedule frequency. Note, though, that Administrator isn't aware of available drives on remote systems and leaves you to ensure that the drives selected actually exist. Basic alerting facilities are provided so you can send messages to any number of email accounts to advise if a Diskeeper task failed to complete. A useful feature is the option to keep track of free disk space on each client and be advised by email if it falls below a predefined threshold.

We've always been impressed with Diskeeper, as it's still the best disk defragmenter in the world, and the Administrator component could also prove a valuable ally for network support staff. It provides plenty of access for remote disk management and good scheduling and reporting tools, but it's by no means perfect and certainly isn't the best effort we've seen from Executive Software.