Ruby Tuesday's Uses Ground-breaking Automatic Defragmentation Software to Keep Back Office Efficient

New defrag technology eliminates productivity loss that can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Every minute a manager spends maintaining a PC is time taken away from running a restaurant

Burbank, CA (PRWEB) February 26, 2008 -- Defrag software eliminates productivity loss that can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"Every minute a manager spends maintaining a PC is time taken away from running a restaurant," says Michael A. Thomas, Ruby Tuesday's Director of IT Infrastructure.

Disk defragmentation is not just a technical issue; it is a core business issue, an enormous robber of productivity. Performance erosion is easily quantified, demonstrating the clear benefits of disk defrag.

A productivity loss of just 30 seconds per hour due to a slowdown in computer or server performance in a restaurant open 12 hours daily year-round is equivalent to 36.5 hours, or 47.5 forty-five-minute customer visits. For 900 locations with parties of three people spending an average of $15 apiece, the potential total revenue loss can be $2,137,000 a year, an enormous amount in the restaurant industry, where profit margins already are razor thin.

To keep its operation running smoothly, Ruby Tuesday uses sophisticated software solutions that run every aspect of restaurant operation, including point-of-sale order entry, staff scheduling, menu and inventory control, kitchen order routing, payment processing, and more. A touchscreen application is used by waitstaff order-entry terminals, which communicates through a controller and the server to dispatch food orders to ruggedized kitchen video display screens where chefs prepare each meal.

During normal operation it is not uncommon for most business software to create and delete hundreds of temporary files. As these temporary files are deleted, space on the hard drive is created to fit new data. When data does not fit into a particular space, the data is split apart and placed, in linear fashion, in the next available open space--sometimes fragmenting the file numerous times.

As data is continually added and deleted, gradual performance erosion occurs slowing file open times, boot-up and shut down times or no response from applications or the operating system and system crashes.

Thomas's staff recognized that a key to maintaining high levels of performance and speeding file open and save times was to minimize file fragmentation on its hundreds of distributed systems using automatic defragmentation software.

Defragmentation software gathers all the pieces of each file and program and puts them together in one place which in turn puts all the unused space together.

Traditionally defragmentation utilities required system downtime and scheduled runs to defragment files and did not address fragmentation between scheduled runs. Today however, Diskeeper Corporation, developer of Diskeeper 2008--the only automatic defragmenter--uses InvisiTaskingTM to defragment hard drives in real time.

Diskeeper 2008 only utilizes untapped, unused resources to defrag volumes and PC performance and productivity are never impacted by the consolidation of free space on hard drives.

Before shipping back office computers to new restaurants, the Ruby Tuesday IT infrastructure team installs Diskeeper. The program is configured to run in full automatic mode and to run invisibly, without displaying information on the screen. Users never see it. "Every minute a manager spends maintaining a PC is time taken away from running a restaurant," says Thomas.

To learn more about how Ruby Tuesday keeps their systems running at peak performance or to learn more about automatic defragmentation with InvisiTasking can save your organization thousands of dollars, visit the Diskeeper white paper page.

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