Many vendors provide free analysis tools, they do so because they are an incredibly effective way to start the process of technical “buy-in” to support a sales cycle.
 
Even if the provision of these free tools is not entirely altruistic, that should not detract from their usefulness.
 
Take the Dell Performance Analysis Collection Kit (DPACK) tool kit. On the one hand it is a tool that is designed to help Dell make the justification to move your storage hardware to a shared platform. On the other hand it is a genuinely useful tool that is provided Free Of Charge with absolutely no obligation on those who use it.
 
The bottom line is that DPACK is a very useful tool that provides systems administrators with valuable consultancy level information at no charge.
 
On this basis alone we recommend you take a look. If you are interested in understanding how consolidating and sharing storage hardware resources could save you money and improve performance, then definitely download the DPACK tool kit and take advantage of this free offering from Dell.
 
DPACK is agentless, runs in memory and in less than 24 hours gathers the information required to build highly insightful reports that will help you calculate the right mix of Compute (servers) and Storage you will need as your business evolves.
 
The data collected is stored in a specific file, which is sent to a dell representative. This is used to deliver back in depth reports that help  IT Managers with future planning for migration to next generation platforms.  DPACK reports simulate how workloads might perform when migrated to shared resources, they also analyse individual servers and help IT Managers and Systems Administrators to analyse bottle necks in their existing environments.
 

There is no restriction on how often you can use the DPACK tool kit,  Dell understands that as an infrastructure evolves the need to re-analyse continues.
 
As technology is moving to software defined shared resources including offloading compute and storage to the cloud, it is clear that vendors really do need to help IT managers understand how to realise savings through aggregation. That’s why a tool like DPACK is not a gimmick. It is a genuinely useful resource that we recommend IT managers and storage administrators take full advantage of.
 
You can download the DPACK toolkit at:
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/dell-performance-analysis-collection-kit-dpack
 
We recommend that you do!