Press Releases

CiRBA Announces Enterprise-Class Analytics Platform for 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

Toronto, Ontario - August 31, 2010 - CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software, today announced the release of CiRBA Version 6.0. With Version 6.0, CiRBA provides an enterprise solution for efficiency management that meets the evolving demands of increasingly virtualized and consolidated data centers. Version 6.0 enables centralized, cross-functional visibility, collaboration, and control over the efficiency and risk of all systems within data centers.

Maximizing Efficiency in Virtual Infrastructure through
Next Generation Efficiency Management

Virtualization and its potential impact on efficiency have changed the way organizations manage their IT infrastructure. To fully exploit the advantages of virtualization and cloud technologies, organizations must be able to make faster decisions within very fluid environments. This cannot be achieved without a scientific approach that can cope with a huge number of variables, while at the same time ensuring all participants in the process can work together effectively. Rather than focusing on measuring and profiling the utilization of individual workloads and servers, the emphasis in these environments is on ensuring efficient overall use of capacity through the effective placement of workloads. Because workload placements are often constrained by both technical and business considerations, the activities of capacity managers, infrastructure managers, application owners, and architects must now be far more coordinated and collaborative than in the past.

With the release of Version 6.0, CiRBA’s 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 customizable dashboards to facilitate cross-functional collaboration and increase control over the efficiency and risk within a data center.

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 utilization-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 center-based metrics, key business metrics, trends in utilization levels and technology deployments, and status against key modernization 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 normalized 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 virtualization 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 organizations this consumes huge amounts of time. Those relying on manual approaches and spreadsheets simply cannot aggregate the required data, analyze it accurately, and provide answers with any level of reliability. Organizations are exposed to significant risk and cost by leaving the analysis to error-prone, time-consuming, unreliable methods.”

In addition to the new customizable, role-based dashboards, Version 6.0 provides:

New Intelligence Catalog consisting of customizable 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.
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.
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 organization. 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 organizations to avoid costly problems such as over-provisioning, performance issues, and downtime that arise from acting on poor quality analyses,” said Hillier.

CiRBA Version 6.0 will be available in October 2010

CiRBA Version 6.0 builds on the only cross-platform analytics solution that enables organizations to safely maximize 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 maximize utilization. CiRBA’s policy-driven multi-dimensional analysis simultaneously examines detailed configuration data, business policies and utilization patterns and personalities. It is only through looking at the intersection of these three types of constraints that organizations can control risk while optimizing the efficiency and manageability of infrastructure.

Media Contact:

Jennifer Korail
Airfoil Public Relations for CiRBA Inc.
+1-248-304-1429
korail@airfoilpr.com