Forward-Looking Capacity Analysis

In addition to ensuring that sufficient checks and balances are in place to enable proper current-state operation, it is necessary for organizations to model future-state capacity requirements. This is critical to ensure that resource demands and potential risks are identified with enough advance notice that they can be managed proactively.

Monitoring Future State Health through Trend Analysis

Growth analysis is critical to understanding when current capacity will be exhausted. There are typically two drivers of this growth: Organic business growth, caused by the natural increase in activity of applications, and event-led growth, which typically arises from special business activities. CiRBA enables you to observe trends in historical data (which is a good indicator of organic growth,) as well as offering mechanisms for business analysts to enter anticipated demands based on forecasted activity. CiRBA provides flexibility in analysis and growth modeling to accurately determine future capacity requirements including the precise amount of new capacity that must be introduced to prevent performance degradation and outages.

CiRBA provides the following:

• Straight-line trending of historical utilization data for each system and each resource type (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.)
• Modeling business-led growth factors (either as a growth rate or a fixed uplift to utilization levels)
• Analyzing forward-looking scenarios, such as 30/60/90 day look-aheads
• Notifications of analysis findings, such as future workload rebalancing recommendations and capacity shortfalls that would require hardware procurement

Modeling Potential Future State Status and Requirements through Forward-Looking
What-if Analysis

In addition to trending, CiRBA also enables analysis of other forward-looking scenarios to provide proper visibility into future requirements. These scenarios include analysis of the following:

• Adding/removing physical hosts from virtual clusters
• Temporary off-lining of physical resources for maintenance tasks, such as evacuating server frames
• Adding/removing VMs from a cluster due to application releases or transient requirements
• Adding Cloud instances to Cloud infrastructure to ensure that sufficient capacity is reserved to service ad-hoc and user instance requests

Refreshing Hardware and Software Resources

Technology refresh is a necessary, ongoing process for both physical and virtual environments. While refresh of virtual environments may seem simpler since the mobility of workloads can enable the transition to new gear to happen without interruption, it offers additional complexity in determining which hardware is optimal. Simply buying the latest generation of the models already in use will often result in over-provisioning, just as it does in physical hardware refresh initiatives. CiRBA provides comprehensive analysis to support physical and virtual technology refresh. Some aspects of CiRBA’s analysis include the following:

• Evaluating existing hardware assets for reuse in the environment to minimize hardware spend
• Analyzing potential cross-platform migration options that the latest technologies might enable
• Analyzing actual resource demand patterns to determine optimal specifications and configuration options of the selected target platform
• Analyzing virtual workloads against blade vs. rack-mount vs. mid-range vs. mainframe vs. Cloud
• Assessing hypervisor technologies, versions, and configurations, to determine if a hypervisor refresh is also required