Server Consolidation Reduces Operational Costs and Improves Reliability

Many data centers operate with tremendously underutilized hardware and software. Large data centers are overly diverse, complex, and difficult to cool and power placing an unnecessary burden on support staff. This waste and complexity can cause millions of dollars of waste in a data center every year. 

Consolidation strategies have gained widespread acceptance as the primary way in which organizations can resolve server sprawl and associated issues. The challenge with consolidation of any type lies in the planning.  Complex environments have many constraints that impact performance, reliability, compliance, cost, security and manageability. Too often organizations limit planning to an examination of workloads, which creates unnecessary risk. When dealing with hundreds or thousands of servers, organizations require powerful analytical support in order to confidently develop and execute on consolidation strategies

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

Virtualization
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.

Database Consolidation
CiRBA Oracle and SQL Server Analysis include over 100 different rules applied to thousands of settings 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 not only analyze for server consolidation, but also 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 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 analysis can show you the best and lowest cost path to transformation. CiRBA rules enable you 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.

	CiRBA employs a proven 10 step methodology for analyzing complex environments and mapping the best consolidation strategies and targets. Learn More >