CiRBA's Placement Intelligence Technology™

CiRBA’s Placement Intelligence Technology™ provides cross-platform, multi-dimensional analysis that enables organizations to optimize virtualized infrastructure, both during the transformational stages and on an ongoing basis to manage dynamic capacity despite constantly changing constraints.

Cross-Platform Data Acquisition

CiRBA offers unmatched flexibility in acquiring data for accurate analyses. Organizations may choose to leverage existing management frameworks and import existing data via a universal importer, deploy simple data acquisition scripts, or utilize CiRBA’s agentless capabilities or read only CiRBA agents.

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Multi-Dimensional Analysis

CiRBA combines the detailed analysis of all critical constraints that impact the success of virtualization initiatives. CiRBA simultaneously analyzes:

Technical Constraints
Through flexible rules-driven analysis, CiRBA analyzes deep hardware, OS, application, middleware and database configuration data so technical fit is accurately assessed.

Business Constraints
CiRBA’s editable rules factor regulatory requirements, maintenance windows, geography, service levels, and other key considerations into the analysis of whether applications or content should reside on the same server.

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To complement its rules-based analyses, CiRBA offers the most powerful utilization analysis available, to accurately model workloads enabling organizations to achieve an optimal balance between risk, service levels, and consolidation ratios.

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• Quartile-based views of utilization patterns
• Complementary pattern detection using like-time as well as time-shift what-if analysis
• Probability analysis for workload contention
• Workload scoring for both peak and sustained activity types
• Advanced benchmarking supporting metrics from SPEC, Ideas International, and others
• Accurate modeling of virtualization technology workloads including CPU overhead
• Historical utilization and workload personality analysis
• Modeling for iSCSI workloads from both a bandwidth and CPU overhead perspective
• Network interconnect tracking and latency analysis

Data Center Explorer

The CiRBA Data Center Explorer allows users to dynamically browse IT environments and entire data centers in order to locate servers and server groups that are of interest.  The explorer enables users to slice and dice environments based on locations, environments, manufacturers, virtual clusters and other configuration and business attributes.

The dynamic groups represented in the explorer can be reported on in various ways or simply copied into an analysis workspace for detailed analysis.  Entire logical trees can be copied over, allowing analysis workspaces to preserve the technical and organizational structure of an environment.

Analytics are then “ attached” to these dynamic models.  This powerful concept creates a new and intuitive paradigm for garnering intelligence from IT environments, and closely mirrors the way most IT practitioners think about, and interact with, their systems.

 

Rules-based Analysis & Control over VMware DRS

CiRBA’s technical and business constraint analysis is driven by packaged and editable rules. Rules are chosen depending on the desired strategy for a given analysis. Some of the Rulesets provided with CiRBA include:

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CiRBA also provides integration to VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), enabling rules defined within CiRBA to control DRS and the motioning of virtual machines so you can take advantage of the workload balancing benefits while respecting critical constraints.

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Weighting & What-if Analysis

CiRBA enables you to modify rules and the weighting of certain criteria.
CiRBA provides several options for quickly and easily performing what-if analysis to compare different scenarios such as adjusting resource capacities or evaluating different server models or virtualization technologies.

Graphical Analysis Dashboards

CiRBA provides summary views of its sophisticated analytics enabling the results of the advanced analysis to be easily understood and utilized by a broad base of users within IT. Analysis results are depicted in intuitive graphical dashboards including:

• P2V Virtualization
• V2V Rebalancing
• P2P Application and Database Stacking
• Risk Analysis
• Gold Standard Comparison
• Rule-Based Compliance

For trained users a simple navigation step will bring up the detailed compatibility maps, showing per-constraint views with drilldowns to configuration and workload pattern details.

Compatibility Maps

Through its unique compatibility maps, CiRBA offers an intuitive way of visualizing your environment. After completing a rigorous analysis of your environment given the constraints and rules chosen, the software renders a series of compatibility maps related to key configuration, business, workload constraints and overall compatibility.

• Color coding and scoring within the maps to show the compatibility of servers
• Drill down to a detailed compatibility report
• Auto-fit Transfer arrows that calculate the best opportunities for consolidation based on heuristic optimization algorithms
• Detailed actionable consolidation roadmap reports

Flexible Notifications

CiRBA provides flexible, customizable email-based notifications to enable key analysis findings relating to optimization recommendations and potential risks to be pushed to the relevant users automatically. These notifications closely align with the work patterns of many IT practitioners and subject matter experts, allowing the benefits of deep, ongoing analytics to be leveraged while multi-tasking and focusing on other priorities.