Capacity Control in
Virtual & Cloud Infrastructure

Most organizations today combat risk in virtualized infrastructure by
over-provisioning, significantly over-provisioning.

Excess capacity and allocations create a costly buffer zone that erodes the ROI on virtualization and cloud initiatives, but it's a cost that most organizations feel they have no choice but to incur because of the complexity of these new school environments.

Shared infrastructure, workload mobility, and the rate of change in these environments greatly increases management complexity resulting in a lack of visibility and control.

CiRBA's Control Console gives organizations unprecedented visibility and control over efficiency and risk. By providing complete visibility and precise actions as to what needs to be done to improve efficiency and reduce risk, CiRBA provides the missing element required to mitigate risk and run efficient infrastructure.

CiRBA Control Console for Virtual & Cloud Infrastructure
Andrew Hillier, CiRBA CTO & Co-Founder

See Risks and Inefficiencies in a Single Glance

CiRBA's Control Console reveals whether or not VMs, hosts or clusters have "Too Little Infrastructure" (resources in the red band), "Too Much Infrastructure" (resources in the yellow band) or are "Just Right" (resources in the green band). This provides a simple, intuitive way of understanding what is at risk, what is inefficient, and where action needs to be taken. Infrastructure managers use the console view to achieve a simple goal of moving all of the entities in an environment into the "Just Right" area of the Control Console. This powerful management paradigm radically changes the way infrastructure requirements are viewed and managed, highlighting waste and inefficiency and the steps required to address these issues in a way not previously possible.

Measure Efficiency with The CiRBA Efficiency Index

CiRBA is unique in its ability to accurately measure how much infrastructure is required according to the workload requirements and operational and business policies applied to an environment.

CiRBA is unique in its ability to accurately measure how much infrastructure is required according to the workload requirements and operational and business policies applied to an environment. CiRBA calls this measure the CiRBA Efficiency Index, and it's the one true measure of how well an organization is leveraging the infrastructure available in its environment. The CiRBA Efficiency Index reflects how many servers you require to meet all constraints (utilization, policies, growth, bookings) versus how many you have.

Receive Daily Actions to Reduce Operational Risks

CiRBA's Control Console provides a simple way of seeing where risks lie in an environment - any entity in the "Too Little Infrastructure" or red zone is at risk according to workload requirements or policies. Along with the visualization, CiRBA's Action System provides specific, detailed recommended actions that can be passed through to third party systems to automate remediation in accordance with change management policies. CiRBA reduces risks associated with:

• Under-allocated VMs - CiRBA enables you to right-size VMs whether you are using a standard instance catalog for clouds or custom VM allocations, and detects under-allocated VMs by providing precise allocation changes to resolve the issue.
• Host and Environment Imbalances - VM rebalancing ensures that growing workload requirements are met and that each workload gets the resources it requires to avoid potential performance issues.
• Inadequate capacity at the cluster and environment levels - CiRBA also tells you when a cluster or environment is running the risk of not having enough capacity and what your true infrastructure requirements are to meet workload and policy requirements.
• Datastore capacity status - CiRBA enables you to track the status of datastores in VMware environments in order to see which datastores are low on capacity, which are appropriately utilized and those that have excess capacity. Users can also select a datastore to identify which Hosts and VMs are connected to it.

Receive Daily Actions to Maximize VM Density and Efficiency

CiRBA uniquely enables organizations to maximize efficiency and density in virtual and cloud infrastructure. Alongside recommended actions to reduce risk, CiRBA's Action System produces daily actions that enable you to increase efficiency by reclaiming resources and optimizing use of existing capacity. CiRBA improves efficiency by addressing:

Control Infrastructure According to Operational Policies

Only CiRBA's analytics model an organization's business and operational policies so that requirements for SLAs, regulations, DR, HA, and other critical criteria are reflected, measured and complied with to ensure low risk, highly actionable answers. Policies effectively form a "contract" that ensures the safe operation and appropriate placement of workloads.

CiRBA ships with six standard policies based on best practices that are easily configured and applied through the Policy Manager. These policies include Production Critical, Production IT, Production Cloud, Production Batch / HPC, Pre-Production, and Dev / Test. Settings available through these policies relate to guest density, guest performance, availability, placement volatility, operational windowing, resource reclamation, compliance and automation.

Model Tech Refresh or Migration to Other Environments such
as Internal Clouds

CiRBA provides Dynamic Transformation Planning enabling you to quickly model server refresh and transformation scenarios such as migration to cloud environments directly from the Control Console UI by simply dragging workloads to the landing zone.

This capability is particularly effective for modeling "lift and shift" planning when you want to make room in a particular environment for new workloads coming in by pushing workloads to another environment or getting a fast understanding of how a server refresh will impact capacity health in the environment.

In addition to daily operational control over existing virtual and cloud infrastructure, CiRBA provides capabilities surrounding:

Capacity Reservations & On-boarding
Capacity Forecasting
Management Automation
Transformation Planning