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The Live Optics Dossier utility can be used to estimate the potential benefits of OneFS’ inline data reduction on a dataset. Dossier is available for Windows and Linux and has no dependency on a Dell PowerScale cluster. This makes it useful for analyzing and estimating efficiency across real data in place, without the need for copying data onto a cluster.
Dossier operates in three phases:
Description | |
Discovery | Users manually browse and select root folders on the local host to analyze. |
Collection | Once the paths to folders have been selected, Dossier will begin walking the file system trees for the target folders. This process will likely take up to several hours for large file systems. Walking the file system has a similar impact to a malware or anti-virus scan in terms of the CPU, memory, and disk resources that will be utilized during the collection. Customizable options allow the user to deselect more invasive operations and govern the CPU and memory resources allocated to the Dossier collector. |
Reporting | Users upload the resulting ‘.dossier’ file to create a Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel report. |
To obtain a Live Optics Dossier report, first download, extract, and run the Live Optics collector (from https://www.liveoptics.com/). Local and remote UNC paths can be added for scanning. Ensure you are authenticated to the wanted UNC path before adding it to Dossier’s ‘custom paths’ configuration.
Be aware that the Dossier compression option only processes the first 64 KB of each file to determine its compressibility. Also, the configuration samples 20% (by default) of the dataset, but this setting is configurable. Increasing this value improves the accuracy of the estimation report, albeit at the expense of extended job execution time.
The compressibility scan runs rapidly, with minimal CPU and memory resource consumption. It also provides thread and memory usage controls, progress reporting, and a scheduling option to allow throttling of scanning during heavy usage windows.
When the scan is complete, a ‘*.dossier’ file is generated. This file must be manually uploaded to the Live Optics web portal to generate the PowerPoint and Excel report. See https://support.liveoptics.com/hc/en-us/articles/17358092010779 for more information on uploading the .dossier file to generate the reports.
Once uploaded and processed, a PowerPoint and Excel report are generated in real time and downloaded to your computer.
Compression reports are easy to comprehend. If multiple SMB shares or paths are scanned, a summary is generated at the beginning of the report, followed by the details of each individually selected path.
Live Optics Dossier can be found at: https://app.liveoptics.com/tools/dossier
Documentation is at: https://support.liveoptics.com/hc/en-us/sections/360012122533
When running the Live Optics Dossier tool, keep in mind the following considerations: