Overview
Gathering workload characteristics and performance details is a task that most customers avoid due to complexity or resources needed. This often results in overdesign, overspending, and frustration in a support, expansion or purchasing cycle. Dell Partners plays a key role in this data collecting / sizing process and using the appropriate tools such as Live Optics makes this task easier and more efficient. This document provides an overview of Live Optics, how it works and the benefits of using the tool, with Channel Partners in mind.
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What is Live Optics?
Live Optics is a no cost, agnostic, remote and private agentless discovery, and assessment tool. It is an industry leading presales software suite used to gather information about your customer’s datacenter environment, with the ability to visualize the output and share the results with your team or with your customer.
Available Collections
There are five Live Optics Collector to choose from, each with its own set of asset types.
Server & Cloud:
This collector includes live inventory and performance insight of hosts and VMs regardless of platform or vendor.
The Asset types included are:
- Optical Prime
- AWS
- Azure
- Nutanix
- RAPID Discovery
Data Protection:
This Collector type provides insight to platform specific backup and protection cycles as well as presenting the capacity that is being protected.
The Asset types included are:
- Avamar
- Cohesity
- Commvault
- Data Domain
- IBM TSM
- NetBackup
- NetWorker
- PowerProtect DM
- Veeam
Storage:
This Collector output provides a detailed breakdown at the hardware appliance level of configuration and performance.
The Asset types included are:
- ClariiON / VNX
- Hitachi
- HPE 3PAR
- IBM Storwize
- Isilon
- NetApp
- PowerStore
- Pure
- SAN Health
- SC
- Unity
- VMAX / PowerMax
- vSAN
- XtremIO
File:
Rapid characterization of storage growth, file types, and predictive potential for archive, compression, or deduplication are included in this Collection type.
The Asset types included are:
- Dossier
Workloads:
Insights to machine and installation details, supported SQL-specific features, a list of databases, database size, etc. This type of understanding is beneficial to understand what databases are within which Instance and on what host the SQL Database is installed on; this is perfect for inventory taking.
The solutions provided in this category are:
- Oracle
- SQL Server
How does it work?
Live Optics gives you direct access to the data and resources you need with three core features:
- Collect - Capture performance, software, OS distribution and VM data for time frames ranging from a few hours to one week. Live Optics runs only in memory, making no modifications to servers while it gathers data with near zero overhead. It uses common protocols that require no “change control” or firewall modifications.
- Visualize - See your customer’s environment in near real-time and eliminate guesswork. With Live Optics, you can even model project requirements to gain a deeper knowledge of your customer’s workloads. The Viewer console gives you quick access to graphs and calculations from the Live Optics analytics engine, so you can clearly see resource requirements for all workloads.
- Share - Consult with IT pros worldwide, or just the people you choose. Data is zoned within your company profile, and it is not automatically visible to anyone else. Live Optics allows you to share performance and workload data characteristics securely and anonymously. You can collaborate with peers and vendors without compromising security.
The more you run Live Optics, the more accurate information will be available to you. Live Optics can be used in the situations described below (but not limited to):
- As a discovery tool
Before talking to your customer about any specific need, use it to have consistent information about the datacenter environment and optimize the time to value.
- At regular intervals
Customers' environments are constantly growing and evolving, and so are your opportunities when you have the most up-to-date information.
- In the beginning and after the project is delivered.
Set the baseline and discuss with more confidence the project goal and verify that all the goals and outcomes have been met.
Live Optics Outputs
Live Optics has a dynamically rich online portal that allows users to review multiple performance metrics in multiple formats.
- Data Driven Analysis of Optical Prime Projects
Inform your customers about their environments, highlighting potential problems such as security risks and over provisioning.- PPTX, Excel reports available
- Hardware vendor agnostic
- AIR (Automated Insight Report)
- Feature/Effort Key Takeaways:
- Identify expired Operating Systems
- Identify expired vCenter versions
- List storage vendors
- Virtual Machine configurations
- Over Provisioning
"Air Report – Physical / Virtual / Cloud reporting"
What are the benefits of Live Optics for Channel Partners?
As a partner you have access to Team functionality where you can:
- Administer your own accounts and admins
- Co-Brand with your logo, collector and reports
- Personalized marketing page, customer signup page
- Team sharing
- Unlimited usage of Live Optics
- As many users (team members) as needed
Live Optics Team mode allows you to manage your own partner portal