CiRBA Inc., a provider of data center analytics software, has begun shipping CiRBA version 7, which provides a console for visualizing and controlling virtual and cloud infrastructures.
According to Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, a key aspect of the console is the new policy system that allows users to achieve a very detailed model of the rules that govern operational environments. CiRBA is pre-shipping standard policies out of the box which are based on its work with customers, and users also can tune the policies to fit their specific situations, he tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The console provides the ability to view the status of an environment over time with historical, current, and predictive views; a policy manager that helps apply and tune policies; and a capacity bookings system to track inbound and outbound hosts and guests. With the console, users can see, at a single glance, which resources are optimally placed and configured, which are problematic, and which are inefficient at the cluster, host and guest levels.
In addition, says Hillier, "We have a bookings system now that let's you to model what is coming into the environment and what is leaving the environment." The bookings system enables users to look into the future at 30 days or 60 days out and see what the environment is going to look like and understand, for example, if they will be short on capacity or have too much. "For cloud environments, this is absolutely critical because cloud is a very dynamic environment," Hillier says.
A third key element is an actions system that manages what to do with recommendations. Together, he says, the policies and the bookings systems model what is happening to the environment, and the actions system covers what users need to do to deal with it, and all of this is wrapped up in the interactive user interface.
For more information, visit www.cirba.com.