Cirba Announces Enterprise-class Analytics Platform For Capacity & Efficiency Management

Sept. 1, 2010 - PRLog -- CIRBA ANNOUNCES ENTERPRISE-CLASS ANALYTICS PLATFORM FOR

CAPACITY & EFFICIENCY MANAGEMENT



CiRBA Version 6.0 adds unique cross-functional dashboards to enable executives, capacity managers, and operations to collectively manage efficiency and risk across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure

London, UK – 1st September, 2010 – CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Centre Intelligence (DCI) software, today announced the release of CiRBA Version 6.0. With Version 6.0, CiRBA provides an enterprise solution for capacity and efficiency management that meets the evolving demands of increasingly virtualised and consolidated data centres. Version 6.0 enables centralised, cross-functional visibility, collaboration, and control over the efficiency and risk of all systems within data centres. CiRBA Version 6.0 will be available in October 2010.  
With the release of Version 6.0, CiRBA’s capacity and efficiency management software is the only solution capable of supporting these changing dynamics. CiRBA combines unique, cross-platform analytics with flexible role-based views of environments through customisable dashboards to facilitate cross-functional collaboration and increase control over the efficiency and risk within a data centre.

CiRBA’s new dashboards deliver key analysis answers and relevant system information to any user according to their role and access permissions. Going well beyond the utilisation-oriented views of traditional capacity management approaches, these dashboards tap into CiRBA’s advanced analytics engine to provide specific, actionable answers that were previously unavailable. This scientific approach means that more of the decision-making process is automated and less is left to the interpretation of the user, saving time, increasing accuracy and reducing risk.

Dashboard view examples include:
CIO / Executive views that provide overall measures of efficiency and risk across all platforms, vendors, and lines of business.  This includes overall computational efficiency, geographical, and data centre-based metrics, key business metrics, trends in utilisation levels and technology deployments, and status against key modernisation and efficiency goals.
Infrastructure and operations manager views that continuously report detailed use of capacity, workload rebalancing opportunities, capacity efficiency recommendations, potential capacity shortfalls, resource misallocations, host and guest configuration risks, and new workload placement strategies. These views may also include advanced resiliency analysis, such as simulated cabinet/PDU/site failure, to provide daily insight into readiness and potential exposure.
Capacity manager views that provide normalised analysis of supply and demand at the cluster, application and business service level.  This includes demand trending and forecasting based on both historical data, as well as models of anticipated business changes and activity, providing insight into saturation points that dictate when new hardware or cloud capacity will be required.
Cloud infrastructure manager views, which focus on the measurement of “whitespace” within compute pools, the maintenance of demand buffers to absorb new workloads, the rapid placement of new workloads based on self-service models, and the reservation of capacity based on known or anticipated demands.  These elements extend the base infrastructure management functions to enable higher agility in the management of cloud environments.
Application Owner / Line of Business views that provide simplified access to activity levels, trends, risks and opportunities. These views are designed to provide broad information delivery with little or no familiarity with the underlying analysis models, thus providing insight well beyond the core IT users.
“As virtualisation rates increase, we have seen a broader group participating in capacity-related decisions, and an increase in the number of individuals needing to track efficiency and risk related metrics,” said Andrew Hillier, CIRBA CTO and Co-founder. “For many organisations this consumes huge amounts of time. Those relying on manual approaches and spreadsheets simply cannot aggregate the required data, analyse it accurately, and provide answers with any level of reliability. Organisations are exposed to significant risk and cost by leaving the analysis to error-prone, time-consuming, unreliable methods.”

In addition to the new customisable, role-based dashboards, Version 6.0 provides:
New Intelligence Catalogue consisting of customisable bookmarked links that take a user directly to any element an analyst wants to share. Bookmarks can be leveraged for quick access to any CiRBA data element. Additionally, enhanced reporting that enables results to be automatically generated and made available to users. Reports can also be published directly in formats such as Word, PowerPoint and CSV to increase the ability to share analysis results. Finally, New Answer Quality Rating that enables analysts and consumers of answers to quickly determine if a given analysis meets the standards for quality as established by the organisation. This rating is based on the amount and type of data available, the type of analysis, and thresholds and settings as determined by the analyst. Answer Quality Ratings ensure that when infrastructure decisions are made, they are based on the best possible answers.
“Reliable and actionable answers require highly detailed, recent and complete data. CiRBA is the only solution that provides a quality rating that shows the users of the answers that all of these requirements have been met. Without this, in many cases analysts may be trusting answers that are invalid, unreliable or just plain risky. CiRBA enables organisations to avoid costly problems such as over-provisioning, performance issues, and downtime that arise from acting on poor quality analyses,” said Hillier.

CiRBA’s Version 6.0 builds on the only cross-platform analytics solution that enables organisations to safely maximise the efficiency of physical and virtual infrastructure by determining how much capacity is truly required, how it should be allocated, and where to place workloads in order to maximise utilisation. CiRBA’s policy-driven multi-dimensional analysis simultaneously examines detailed configuration data, business policies and utilisation patterns and personalities. It is only through looking at the intersection of these three types of constraints that organisations’ can control risk while optimising the efficiency and manageability of infrastructure.

About CiRBA Inc.
CiRBA Data Centre Intelligence (DCI) software enables organisations to safely maximize efficiency through the intelligent planning and management of capacity within physical and virtual infrastructure. Only CiRBA’s policy-driven analytics accurately answer the questions of how much capacity is truly required, how it should be allocated, and where to place workloads in order to maximise utilisation. For more information, visit www.cirba.com.

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