Case Studies at CiRBA

CiRBA Enables Creation of New Hardware
Procurement Processes

When a global organization wanted to introduce virtualization into their production environment, they turned to CiRBA. The organization also leveraged the solution’s robust analytical capabilities to establish new business processes to control the creation of virtual machines and procurement of hardware.

The organization was no stranger to planning virtualization, having already consolidated a small group of testing servers in development. However, when the team wanted to expand their consolidation initiative to focus on production servers they knew the capacity planning approach they used to assess the homogeneous test servers wouldn’t be useful. The organization searched for a solution that would take into account the complex and heterogeneous nature of production environments and the unique non-technical factors, including compliance and management parameters that dictate placements of virtualized applications. In addition, as the new initiative included UNIX-based systems in the consolidation initiative, the team required a cross-platform solution.

Having met the rigorous solution requirements criteria, CiRBA was selected to conduct the analysis. After examining multiple options for virtualizing the key production systems, the team achieved a 63% consolidation rate. In addition, they found that by adding 25% more RAM to a group of ESX servers, they could reduce their overall ESX server requirements by 17%. The initiative was such a success that the organization wanted to institutionalize virtualization by establishing new processes surrounding server acquisition. Every new application is now evaluated for suitability as a virtualization candidate and fit within the existing environment using CiRBA. Requisitions for new hardware are only approved after the environment is evaluated using CiRBA and it is determined that existing infrastructure will not support the requirements. These new business processes place tight controls over the acquisition of new hardware assets and new virtual machines, enabling the organization to prevent re-sprawl of physical assets as well as virtual sprawl.