Gaining Control using the
CiRBA Control Console

CiRBA DCI-Control enables organizations to gain unprecedented control over virtual and cloud infrastructure by making faster, smarter decisions about where to place workloads and how to allocate resources. Only CiRBA's cross-platform analytics can act as the brain for virtual and cloud infrastructure, enabling you to know precisely what needs to be done in order to balance of risk and efficiency in accordance with your unique operational policies.

DCI-Control helps organizations with:

Seeing Risks and Inefficiencies in a Single Glance
Measuring Efficiency with One Metric - The CiRBA Efficiency Index
Addressing Risks
Maximizing VM Density and Efficiency
Controlling Placements According to Operational Policies
Ensuring the Right Amount of Capacity is Available for Coming Demand
Streamlining Business Processes through Automation

 

Seeing 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 means of understanding what is at risk, what is inefficient, and where action needs to be taken. Infrastructure managers use the Spectrum view to work toward 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.

Measuring Efficiency with One Metric
- 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 calls this measure CiRBA Efficiency Index and it's the one true measure of how well an organization is leveraging the infrastructure available in its environment. Without this measure, organizations are unable to know precisely how much infrastructure they truly require.

Addressing 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.. CiRBA enables organizations to reduce risks at the environment, cluster, host and guest levels. CiRBA's Control Console provides specific actions that enable you to address risks such as:

• 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.
  
  

Maximizing VM Density and Efficiency

CiRBA uniquely enables organizations to maximize efficiency and density in virtual and cloud infrastructure.

• Over-allocated VMs - Over-allocations can be a common area of waste, particularly in cloud environments where self-service models allow users to determine allocations. CiRBA ensures that service levels are met according to policies and specifies exactly how much resource each workload requires so you can confidently reclaim and reallocate resources.
• Inefficient workload placements - CiRBA analytics determines the precise workload placements required to safely "defrag" server capacity and fit the workloads onto the minimum amount of infrastructure. Maximizing VM density through server capacity defrag and considering operational policies and service levels enables you to fit more workloads into an existing environment, reduce your infrastructure footprint, or simply avoid hardware purchases.
  
  

Controlling Placements 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. 

Ensuring the Right Amount of Capacity is Available
for Coming Demand

Users can also see an environment's status and requirements over time by leveraging historical, current and predictive views through the Control Console. The predictive analytics incorporate "Bookings" to reserve capacity for new workloads and hosts coming online (or systems leaving the environment) so that a comprehensive, forward-looking view is provided. This helps to ensure enough capacity is budgeted and the guesswork of determining future requirements is eliminated. The Control Console can also act as a fuel gauge for new environments, showing how much room is available in a given environment for new workloads, helping with the migration from existing infrastructure over to virtual or cloud environments. The Action System in the Control Console leverages these analytics to provide users with details and automation options for workload placement changes, resource allocation changes and capacity changes recommended to optimize an environment.

Streamlining Business Processes through Automation

CiRBA enables recommended actions such as changing VM allocations, rebalancing VMs, or rebalancing workloads to be automatically pushed to third-party systems such as VMware® vCenterTM packaged or custom integrations. CiRBA's new API enables organizations to streamline business processes and automate the execution of CiRBA analysis results by building integrations to additional applications such as help desks, and provisioning and orchestration tools.