Live Optics: A CIO’s Guide to Optimizing Infrastructure Planning Efficiency

Infrastructure planning made simple.

This blog is co-authored by J.D. Morris, Consultant, ISG Portfolio Marketing.

In today’s fast-paced business world, efficient infrastructure planning and optimization are imperative for organizations striving to maintain a competitive edge. With today’s core, cloud and edge architectural complexity, a technology inventory and operational performance assessment is beyond human management alone. CIO teams need a repeatable methodology to baseline and benchmark their existing infrastructure performance versus cost, determine over and under-provisioning and gain insights into innovation and growth opportunities.

As companies explore innovative solutions to streamline their IT operations, Live Optics has emerged as a game-changing tool and the de facto standard over the last 20 years. With its robust feature set and user-friendly interface, Live Optics is revolutionizing infrastructure planning efficiency, garnering the trust of the top 100 U.S. companies, and challenging the conventional “go big” or overprovisioning deployment model. With Live Optics, CIOs receive custom proposals for their unique scenario to simplify infrastructure planning, drive “right-sized” buying decisions and make informed decisions to strike a balance between performance and cost over time.

The Three Pillars of Live Optics: Your Blueprint for Success

  1. Discover: Delivering Visibility and Clarity

Infrastructure planning hinges on understanding your assets and their utilization. Live Optics provides a repeatable and quantifiable methodology to build a historical baseline, comprehend current demands and model future growth.

Live Optics provides organizations with the visibility and clarity needed to map their entire IT environment, from the core data center to the cloud and the edge. Achieved through an agentless data collector, Live Optics comprehensively catalogs IT infrastructure, helping organizations locate assets, visualize workloads and understand various parameters. It extends beyond vendor-specific ecosystems, offering multi-vendor visibility, including major cloud providers and OEMs.

Extending beyond simple asset discovery, Live Optics offers deep visibility into asset performance and utilization across your entire infrastructure landscape. Whether you analyze your core data center, cloud-based resources or edge devices, Live Optics ensures consistent clarity and assessment repeatability. This invaluable data empowers IT teams to make informed decisions about resource allocation, performance optimization and cost management.

Live Optics - Data Analysis - unstructured data - Dell - Dell Technologies
Image of data analysis in the Dell Live Optics user interface.
  1. Assess: Gaining Insight and Control

Live Optics enables organizations to analyze their IT environment effectively, identifying under-provisioning, over-provisioning and anomalies in their IT infrastructure. This data-driven approach eliminates guesswork and ensures efficient resource utilization.

Empowering IT professionals to view performance metrics, workload placements and costs, Live Optics offers a deep understanding of customers’ infrastructure. Users can model and compare different options, exporting secure, standardized reports into business intelligence tools for performance versus cost evaluations. These reports form the basis for constructing IT modernization plans and aligning decision-makers and partners with strategic infrastructure plans. With Live Optics Cloud Pricing Calculator, it is straightforward to model existing workload cost performance versus other cloud providers to maximize workload cost-performance placement.

Live Optics promotes teamwork in today’s collaborative IT landscape by allowing cross-functional teams to engage in self-service infrastructure planning cycles. It also facilitates collaboration with trusted partners and vendors, aiding in evaluating IT assessments to develop infrastructure solutions.

Live Optics - Data Analysis - pricing calculator - unstructured data - Dell - Dell Technologies
Image from the Dell Live Optics Pricing Calculator.
  1. Modernize: Ensuring Right-sized Deployments

Ensuring precision in deployments is critical to implementing operational IT changes to ensure right-sized deployments and that resources are allocated where they are most needed, eliminating waste and optimizing performance. Live Optics also identifies opportunities to modernize critical infrastructure assets, providing a competitive advantage in today’s ever-evolving tech landscape.

Organizations leveraging Live Optics can determine whether modernization, migration, repatriation or recalibration of evolving workloads is the best course of action. Qualitative data insights validate workload placement recommendations with stakeholders, ensuring alignment with business goals. Integrating IT assessments with business growth and innovation planning enables targeted IT roadmap development, realistic budget planning and right-size deployments. The assessments ensure IT investments align with broader strategic goals, fostering innovation and growth. Regular check-ins with Live Optics track progress against infrastructure goals, promoting continuous improvement.

A Trusted Solution for Fortune Companies

Over the last fifteen years, Live Optics has emerged as the tool of choice for 99% of Fortune 100 companies seeking to streamline infrastructure planning and optimization. Leveraging Live Optics, these enterprises have experienced a significant reduction in infrastructure planning efficiency from discovery to deployment. Live Optics’ success is rooted in its three pillars: discover, assess and modernize. By harnessing these pillars, organizations eliminate the traditional guesswork and gain key insights, operational control and targeted precision needed to navigate the complex landscape of modern IT environments successfully.

Live Optics continues to innovate and reshape infrastructure planning and optimization. Its three pillars provide organizations with comprehensive insights into their IT assets, performance, and opportunities for improvement. As Live Optics continues to empower leading global companies and CIOs, this repeatable methodology has proven to be a tested and trusted solution, redefining how we approach and streamline infrastructure planning and ensuring businesses remain agile, efficient, and competitive in the digital age.

Learn more about Live Optics here.

Marriette Kershner

About the Author: Marriette Kershner

Marriette Kershner has been with Dell for over seven years serving initially as the Product Manager for the Business Value Assessment (a tool for creating business cases for CI/HCI, storage and data protection products). Her role expanded to Sales Productivity Portal two years ago and now RVTools following its acquisition in late 2023. Marriette began her career as a finance professional, first as a Certified Public Accountant and then as a Controller for a Health Insurance Company, before making the transition to software development product management. Prior to Dell, Marriette worked for Texas Health Resources and Thomson Reuters in various product/project management and technology leadership roles responsible for developing software for accounting and auditing professionals. Married over 41 years, Marriette enjoys spending time with her two sons, four grandchildren, and extended family as well as reading, crafting, baking and playing the piano and harp.