The Asset Archive

A curated repository of research briefings and strategic analysis for the Asset sector.

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Lawnswood School recommends V-locity and Diskeeper software after outstanding results.

As happy V-locity and Diskeeper customers, Lawnswood School shared their experience with another school that was suffering from bad IT performance and their recommendation resulted in a doubling of performance. Lawnswood School in northwest Leeds is one of the top performing 20% in the country. Their IT environment supports a workload that is split between the students and the staff. On any given school day, there are around 1,200 student workloads comprising of millions of small files and documents being created and used by eager students. The same environment supports around 200 staff, creating and implementing engaging lesson plans that make full use of information technology. Moreover, the IT environment copes with all of the usual back office operations that you would expect in any organisation, such as anti virus and anti malware, IT security, file and print, communication and messaging solutions and more. One solution in particular that is useful for the staff, is Impero that supports IT staff and teachers with classroom control features that allow them to focus on delivering great education and IT support, in a safe online environment. Knowing how well the IT environment was performing at Lawnswood School, another school reached out to Noel for help, as their IT environment was almost identical, but suffering from slow and sluggish performance. Noel Reynolds noted that: "They were almost a 'clone' school." "We identified six of the 'most hit' servers and installed Condusiv's software on them. Within 24 hours, we saw a 50% boost in performance. Visibly improved performance had been returned to the users, and this really helped the end user experience."

Jun 17, 2026 8 min read Premium
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A Myriad of Windows Performance Problems Traced to a Single Source

Believe it or not, 12 substantial Windows performance issues that can cause the most frustration and chew up valuable time can be directly traced to a single source. All of the issues that cost you peace of mind can be traced back storage I/O efficiencies. As great as virtualization has been great for server efficiency, one of the biggest downsides to virtualization is that it adds complexity to the data path – otherwise known as the I/O blender effect that mixes and randomizes I/O streams. First, is caused by the behavior of the Windows file system. It will tend to break up writes into separate storage I/Os and send each I/O packet down to the storage layer separately and this causes I/O characteristics that are much smaller, more fractured, more random than they need to be – this along with the I/O Blender effect noted above is the perfect trifecta for bad storage performance. This is a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario that is like pouring molasses on your systems – everything is running, but not running nearly as fast as it could. You could opt to throw more hardware at the problem, but this is expensive and disruptive and can be premature – it is much better to tune what you already own to get the performance you should be. Second, is storage I/O contention. This happens when you have multiple systems all sharing the same storage resource. Windows is breaking up that I/O profile into a much smaller, more fractured, more random I/O profile than it needs to be. If you just clean that up on one VM then all of the data from that one VM to the host is all streamlined, but then you have all the data from neighbor VMs that are still noisy and causing contention. As you can see, your performance is not only penalized once, but twice by storage I/O efficiencies. This means systems process workloads about 50% slower than they should on the typical Windows server because far more I/O is needed to process any given workload. This has been found to be to be the cause of a host of Windows performance problems such as those mentioned earlier.

Jun 17, 2026 8 min read Premium

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