CiRBA, a provider of automated capacity control software, announced a new administrative console designed to enable organizations to automate new workload routing and capacity reservations processes. The Reservation Console is intended to automate the currently manual process of selecting optimal hosting environments for new workloads. The console also automatically reserves compute and storage capacity in advance of use, and provides detailed host-level placement recommendations for the workload.
The console is designed to integrate with existing job scheduling or workload automation systems, Andrew Hiller, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, told 5 Minute Briefing. “This can take several forms. In some cases we will actively feed actions into these systems to drive automation, while in others they may make calls into our web services API to request placements or capacity bookings. It all starts with accurate recommendations, and how these recommendations are actioned can vary based on policies and the tooling that is already in place.”
The Reservation Console features a tunable scoring system that scientifically identifies the optimal destination environment for new workloads. The system provides a Hosting Score based on a range of criteria, including occupancy levels, technical considerations, software licensing constraints, operational policies, and regulatory compliance. Organizations can modify the attributes considered and also tune their weighting so that recommendations are aligned with organizational goals and application owner preferences.
And as its name suggests, the Reservation Console also provides users with a new avenue to reserve capacity in advance of its actual use, helping to ensure that resources will be available for application deployments. The new console complements the environment-level CiRBA Booking Management System by providing visibility into inbound capacity reservation requests and all available environments, enabling routing and reservations into the best environment for each request.
The Reservation Console leverages CiRBA’s workload routing API released in June that enables placement recommendations to be fed directly from CiRBA through to cloud management platforms, such as OpenStack, filling a critical gap in the automation of self-service and planned workload placement requests.
“The automation is driven by our control console and underlying APIs, which generate precise actions to optimize capacity,” Hiller says. “The reservation console sits a level above this, and is focused more on higher-level demand management functions, like routing workloads and reserving capacity. It is designed to be as simple as possible, and it is not necessary to expose the details of the automation actions this level. To draw an analogy, hotel reservation systems don't expose the details of exactly what room you are going to get, just that one has been reserved.”
The new Reservation Console works alongside CiRBA’s Capacity Control Console, which provides daily optimization of workload placements and sizing through rebalancing and VM right-sizing instructions that are fed into hypervisor management solutions.
For more information, visit www.cirba.com.