Novell has released PlateSpin Recon 3.6, a data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool that combines consolidation planning with virtual capacity management to give customers an ongoing view of their physical and virtual infrastructure.
PlateSpin Recon remotely discovers hardware and software inventory across the data center, on a range of operating systems, virtualization platforms and hardware. By examining resource utilization-CPU, disk, memory and network-for each workload over time, it ensures the optimal fit between real workload requirements and available or planned resources. "With PlateSpin Recon 3.6, there are several new features and capabilities that will help customers to profile, analyze and plan what they are doing with their virtual infrastructure," Richard Whitehead, director of product marketing for data center solutions at Novell, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
To improve complex server consolidation and capacity planning initiatives, PlateSpin Recon 3.6 offers "best-fit scenario modeling" to increase server consolidation ratios while minimizing resource contention. Post-consolidation, PlateSpin Recon can also continue to track and analyze key resource utilization metrics as workloads change over time, so customers can re-assess their virtual infrastructures to increase workload performance and reclaim underutilized resources.
Version 3.6 includes new reports to provide additional capabilities for reclamation and consolidation projects, notes Whitehead. The resource reclamation reports offer customers graphical proof points to show resource consumption and reclaimable resources.
Additionally, he adds, Recon 3.6 includes support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, which was introduced at the end of March. Recon 3.6 also provides new Solaris Containers support, allowing customers to plan migrations of Solaris workloads to the Solaris Containers. The goal is to provide the ongoing management of a customer's entire infrastructure, and "leveraging all the capabilities that you have within your data center," Whitehead explains.
And finally, addressing customers' use of the product, there is a new licensing model offering less expensive ongoing analysis of both physical and virtual data center infrastructures. "One of the things we heard loud and clear from our customers is that sometimes they use it on a project level, but often they want to have that ongoing perpetual licensing to monitor and track and do the ongoing maintenance of their data center," says Whitehead. The new licensing model allows customers to license PlateSpin Recon on a per-use basis or on a perpetual basis.
PlateSpin Recon is part of the PlateSpin workload management family, which also includes PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Orchestrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge. For more information about PlateSpin Recon 3.6, go here.