Data Center Consolidation & Relocation

Data center consolidation and relocation provides a significant opportunity for organizations to reduce total cost of ownership and improve efficiency through a variety of means, including server consolidation and virtualization, which only increase the complexity of orchestrating a move. The challenges faced in planning consolidation lie in the complex environments found in today’s data centers. Many experts recommend that planned transformations occur before a move in order to reduce complexity and any disruptions that might take place. When dealing with hundreds or thousands of servers, organizations require powerful analytical support in order to confidently develop and execute on consolidation strategies. Regardless of the approach, underestimating the complexity of planning and coordinating these initiatives almost always leads to significant, costly issues.

CiRBA’s data center intelligence solution supports data center consolidation initiatives through its advanced analysis that enables organizations to determine:

• What exists in the environment?
• What can be consolidated and which strategies or platforms are best?
• How to maximize the efficiency of existing virtualized infrastructure?
• How much hardware required and which platforms to choose?
• How much power will be required?
• Whether Cloud alternatives offer a viable option for some applications?

CiRBA’s Data Center Intelligence software provides cross-platform analysis that enables organizations to rapidly analyze and visually map the safest path to an optimally consolidated and/or virtualized data center. Using a unique multi-dimensional approach, CiRBA addresses all configuration, workload and business constraints required for success within any consolidation initiative.

CiRBA enables organizations to analyze for virtually any server consolidation strategy and design environments on to any hardware platform:

Virtualization Learn More
CiRBA offers the most complete virtualization analysis solution available, whether analyzing for VMware, Citrix, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Zones, LPARs, WPARs, or mainframes, CiRBA quickly finds the lowest risk, maximum impact transformation.

VM Rebalancing
CiRBA can be used to rebalance virtual infrastructure to optimize efficiency and avoid capacity risk and determine whether new VM’s can be added to an existing environment.

Cloud Assessments
CiRBA can be used to assess Cloud offerings or outsourcing options by revealing which systems are good candidates to migrate, determining what allocations and/or hosting tiers are required, and comparing how the options compare to internal virtualization alternatives.

Database Consolidation
CiRBA's Oracle and SQL Server Analysis include more than 100 different rules applied to thousands of settings in order to maximize the success of consolidation efforts. The resulting intelligence identifies where database settings, workloads, and other non-technical constraints are complementary and represent the opportunity to merge onto fewer systems.

Application Stacking
CiRBA's out-of-the-box application server rulesets allow you to analyze for server consolidation, as well as migration onto more scalable platforms, such as application servers running on a mainframe. CiRBA rules check for numerous and detailed settings in the named services and native interfaces, JVM versions and manufacturer, as well as a myriad of resource settings.

OS Stacking
CiRBA's OS stacking analysis deeply analyzes the configurations of both source and target servers and scores them based on similarity or affinity.  Analysis includes workload patterns, technical configuration, as well as non-technical constraints such as change windows, service levels and UPS requirements (powering non critical applications under power outage). Placing applications with differing requirements on the same server makes all of them subject to the same constraints.

Migration/Transformation
CiRBA's analysis can show you the best and lowest cost path to transformation. CiRBA rules enable you to determine the best combination of new target hardware given the configuration and workload of existing applications. CiRBA can also help in the migration of applications across platforms, such as moving from distributed environments to mainframe application servers, in order to take advantage of excess mainframe capacity.

Factoring in Power Consumption

CiRBA analyzes both measured and estimated power draw for individual IT systems, and rolls these measures up to overall utilization, including time-of-day consumption curves for groups of servers and entire data centers. These aggregate rollups are automatically generated for any P2P, P2V and V2V analyses, showing the before and after power consumption for each potential transformation plan.