Raise Efficiency Levels by Applying Advanced Management Principles to Dynamic Infrastructure

Once you have mastered the basics of managing virtualized infrastructure, you can begin to adopt more advanced management principles that enable you to achieve higher levels of efficiency within dynamic infrastructure. Achieving this level of operational maturity requires more advanced analytics that include historical behaviors combined with specific business policies and rules. CiRBA enables organizations to further improve efficiency by providing answers to key questions, including:

How much capacity is really required to service demand?

Whitespace analysis. It’s one thing to stack workloads; it’s another to ensure that you are maintaining sufficient “whitespace” to buffer new capacity demands without going to procurement. CiRBA enables you to accurately determine the true white space in an environment vs. required buffer to ensure that you are purchasing new hardware only when absolutely required.

How efficient is my infrastructure?

Cyclical/seasonal right-sizing. Most businesses have cycles that result in spikes and valleys in utilization. “Time windowing” can be used to right-size an environment for specific periods within an operational cycle in order to reduce power consumption, free up assets for use in other areas of the organization, and potentially allow cloud capacity to be annexed at periods of peak demand.

How can I reduce volatility within virtualized infrastructure?

Rule-based placement governance. Many organizations are considering using technologies such as VMware’s DRS or workload managers to balance load. CiRBA automates the generation of anti-affinity rules to govern run-time movements by workload managers.

How can I optimize infrastructure design so that it meets service level requirements without inflating costs?

Tiered service levels. A very effective way of making better use of infrastructure is to establish multiple service levels by running shared (virtual) environments at different densities based on service tier, SLA, risk profile, etc. Used this way, CiRBA enables organizations to increase densities by up to 2X.

Is there existing infrastructure or hardware that can be redeployed to save costs?

Available asset registry. As you become more efficient there may be server assets that become available for others to utilize. An internal registry of available assets can enable redeployment of servers made available by optimization activity or seasonal fluctuations. This reduces hardware procurement in the short-term and enables the rebalancing of capacity across seasonal cycles without the need for shared environments or Clouds.

How can I mitigate potential risks due to failures?

Scenario-based failure analysis. Virtualized infrastructure is generally far more dense and shared. This creates the potential for failures at various levels to impact many workloads. CiRBA enables you to define rulesets to simulate potential failures (e.g. server, cabinet, PDU, room, site) to determine if sufficient capacity exists to continue operation. This provides advanced scenario-based failure analysis, generating alerts if capacity is not sufficient or is not configured in such a way as to enable resumption of business. Common forms include cluster-level HA analysis and business service-level DR analysis.