Virtualization

Virtualization holds the promise of reducing costs, improving efficiency and utilization, and reducing power consumption and space requirements within the modern data center. The potential benefits are great. The challenge, of course, is the ability to leverage this new paradigm in such a way that enables organizations to realize those benefits without incurring significant cost, risk, and complexity.

The complexity that hides beneath the covers of today’s data centers poses a serious threat to the success of any consolidation initiative. Many organizations begin by assuming virtualization and consolidation planning is an exercise in fitting virtual servers together on physical infrastructure. These capacity-centric approaches don’t consider various strategies, technology options or platforms. Not only are the wrong purchase decisions made, artificially inflating the costs of virtualization, but often the wrong servers and applications are virtualized and incompatible servers are placed together.

This narrow focus on utilization analysis fails to consider key configuration and non-technical constraints within the environment that have a direct impact on cost and ultimately, the success of an initiative. Others may limit the scope of their initiative because they are unsure how to tackle these unforeseen risks, thereby missing critical opportunities for consolidation and cost reduction. The result of both of these approaches is, at best an inefficient operation.

Similar challenges continue to present themselves on an ongoing basis within virtualized infrastructure. Virtualized data centers are dynamic. Added to this dynamism are the complexities of continually optimizing utilization and the challenge of managing new technologies such as motioning.

Traditional management models don’t address these challenges and require a new method for continually assessing and managing capacity in order to keep an environment optimized and efficient. Safely transforming and maintaining a data center requires in-depth analysis of the environment from all perspectives to accurately guide workload placements in a cost-effective and low risk way. Analysis of the same constraints and factors used to establish virtualized infrastructure is required on an ongoing basis to govern and optimize placements and therefore, utilization within these more dynamic environments.

CiRBA’s software enables IT organizations to operate the most cost effective virtualized data center possible. Only CiRBA’s Placement Intelligence Technology™ continually captures and analyzes technical, business, and resource constraints to safely guide workloads to the right physical or virtual infrastructure.