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The Dell 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 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 report. |
To obtain a Live Optics Dossier report, first download, extract, and run the Dossier collector. 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 default configuration samples only 5% of the dataset, but this setting is configurable with a slider. 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. Then, this file is uploaded to the Live Optics website:
Once uploaded and processed, a PowerPoint report is generated in real time and delivered by email.
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/articles/229590207-Dossier-User-Guide
When running the Live Optics Dossier tool, keep in mind the following considerations: