CiRBA, Inc., a provider of data center intelligence software, has announced the release of CiRBA Version 5.2, which features a six-step process and templates for virtualization analysis to ensure that organizations can transform infrastructure safely and cost-effectively. Version 5.2 also provides enhanced data collection management features for improved analysis.
"We have very detailed analytics that we are known for-for virtualization planning and for ongoing management of virtual environments," Andrew Hillier, CTO of CiRBA, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "What we did was step back and say, if you are going to virtualize an environment, what is the best way to plan it, independent of our product, and we came up with a six-step process."
CiRBA's new series of analysis templates embody the six-step process for virtualization analysis. The steps include: 1) candidate qualification to determine which workloads make good or bad candidates for virtualization by analyzing for risk factors within configurations and utilization patterns; 2) workload sizing to understand the best approach given the profile or personality of workloads; 3) detailed analysis to determine which technical and business constraints are important for a given set of workloads through automated what-if analysis; 4) solution design to optimize software, hardware, capacity, and placement decisions and infrastructure design by fine-tuning and selecting between alternative scenarios; 5)implementation, enabling users to track progress at any point and monitor performance during the transformation with up-to-date data; and 6) tracking changes in the environment and accommodate these in further rounds of transformation planning and modeling to drive greater accuracy.
By applying these steps to virtualization initiatives, the resulting environments are not only properly sized but are also compliant with business policies, tuned to specific risk tolerances, SLA requirements, and guided by lessons learned in previous implementations, Hillier says. "It really brings the whole thing down to a couple of hours of work," he adds. "It is really much more repeatable, much more accurate, and it is faster."
Initially, CiRBA will ship six-step analysis templates for VMware physical to virtual transformation analysis, with templates for other platforms such as Hyper-V, Xen, AIX and Solaris to be released this fall. CiRBA currently supports and provides existing rules and analysis templates that accommodate analysis for all virtualization variants on most platforms.
CiRBA Version 5.2 also streamlines data collection management with the introduction of audit workspaces. These workspaces enable organizations to model an environment and apply audit templates to a defined set of targets thereby simplifying auditing processes and enabling the tracking and management of errors and status through intuitive reporting.
CiRBA Version 5.2 will be available September 21. For more information, go here.