Behind the Control Console - CiRBA's Analytics Engine

Powering the revolutionary visualization in the CiRBA Control Console is CiRBA's patented analytics engine. CiRBA's powerful analytics engine combines the most advanced workload analysis with configuration requirements, operational policies, and capacity bookings for inbound and outbound workloads and hosts to accurately model resource requirements and optimal workload placements for today and the future.

CiRBA's Data Collection Framework

Quality data is an essential input to quality analyses. CiRBA's database acts as a centralized repository for all the critical information about your workloads including:

• Technical Configuration Details
  Through flexible rules-driven analysis, CiRBA analyzes deep hardware, OS, application, middleware and database configuration data so technical fit is accurately assessed.
• Business Policies
  CiRBA's configurable policies contemplate regulatory requirements, maintenance windows, geography, service levels, and other key considerations to factor in when placing workloads.
• Resource & Utilization Analysis
  It's critical that utilization analysis goes beyond a comparison of peak utilization and server capacities. CiRBA considers peak and sustained activity, as well as the nature of workload patterns and personalities to accurately determine what fits together. 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.

Populating the Database

CiRBA provides the most flexible data acquisition options available including:

• CiRBA's native data collection options such as scripts, agentless capabilities or read-only agents.
• Integrations to popular third-party systems including HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, TADDM or HP DDM.
• Import data from third-party monitoring or management systems to avoid duplicating data collection activities for utilization or configuration details.

Streamlined Data Validation with Analysis Data Coverage Reporting

Many consolidation initiatives fail or encounter major stumbling blocks because analyses and plans were based on insufficient or poor quality data. CiRBA leverages its intelligent analytics to assess the quality of data available with the Analysis Data Coverage dashboard that analyzes the suitability of collected data for a specific type of analysis. This benefits users throughout the entire data collection phase of an initiative as it enables a fast assessment of the quality of business attribute, configuration, and utilization data for the chosen analysis strategy.

Data Normalization Leveraging Industry Leading Benchmarks

CiRBA provides users with access to Ideas International Relative Performance Estimate (RPE2) benchmarks, as well as CINT benchmarks from SPEC.org. These options ensure maximum possible coverage of available server models through industry standard benchmarks, streamlined processes surrounding benchmark lookup, and accurate data normalization.

Policy Manager

CiRBA's Policy Manager enables you to account for and apply your organization's unique policies governing workload and systems to analyses. Policies formalize a set of management criteria that represent the constraints, regulations and operational goals of your IT environments.  Policies in CiRBA are customizable, enabling you to create a set of unique policies for application to any of your various environments.

CiRBA also ships with six standard policies based on best practices that can be easily configured through the Policy Management UI. These policies include Production Critical, Production IT, Production Cloud, Prod Batch / HPC, Prod-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. 

Policies effectively form a "contract" between infrastructure supply and customer demand to ensure the safe operation and appropriate placement of workloads. The ability to specify and enforce infrastructure requirements and operational constraints in this manner eliminates the need to over-provision "just in case", thereby significantly reducing infrastructure costs.

Bookings System & What-if Analysis for
Planning & Modeling Environmental Changes

Accounting for Inbound & Outbound Guests & Hosts

CiRBA's new Bookings System enables you to track and account for guests (VMs) and hosts coming online and those leaving an environment in the analysis. The Bookings System acts as a reservations system for IT, enabling you to reserve capacity for new workloads and reflect systems leaving an environment so that you can accurately determine future requirements given planned changes. Users can also account for changes to host systems, such as memory upgrades.

Modeling Project-based Environmental Changes

CiRBA can be leveraged to assess the impact of more significant changes in the environment from technology refresh or platform migration through powerful template-driven what-if analysis. Through this capability, you can compare different scenarios, optimize infrastructure and platform choices, fine tune hardware configurations and capacities, and optimize placements and allocations, all to support planning initiatives such as technology refresh, large-scale transformations, migrations, cluster consolidation, and new workload placement.