CiRBA announced the release of Version 5.0 of its virtualization and consolidation analysis software. With Version 5.0, CiRBA enables organizations to build dynamic models of their virtual and physical infrastructure to continually identify opportunities to improve performance, optimize VM placements, and minimize operational risk. Version 5.0 automatically updates analyses to give IT daily control over virtualized infrastructure so that business-critical systems are optimized and safe in spite of the constant change and associated risks that are inherent within virtualized data centers.

“Version 5.0 underscores the fact that all the details that go into planning virtualized infrastructure must also be factored in on a daily basis when managing virtual environments,” said Andrew Hillier, CIRBA CTO and Co-Founder. “All business-level constraints, technical compatibilities, workload personalities, and risk tolerances need to be respected every time an environment undergoes changes. And because virtual environments are constantly changing, CiRBA’s latest release provides the dynamic analysis needed to bring all of this together to optimize utilization and minimize operational risk, while at the same time keeping an eye on minimizing power consumption and maximizing financial returns.”

Dynamic Data Center Intelligence
Using CIRBA Version 5.0, organizations build dynamic models of existing IT environments. These models provide a consolidated view of the critical business, technical, configuration, and workload data typically stored in disparate systems. Pre-packaged and customizable analysis templates are applied to these models in order to provide the intelligence required to transform an environment and continually assess the impact of change within virtualized infrastructure. For example, analytics expose risks, opportunities to improve utilization, performance, power consumption, financials and other key factors. What-if analysis is also greatly accelerated through the use of these new models, as groups of analysis templates can be applied to IT environments in a single step. When evaluating different virtualization strategies, for example, multiple templates can be applied at once, representing different scenarios so that the most effective paths to virtualized infrastructure are uncovered automatically.

Because the analysis is rule-driven, the options for analysis are virtually unlimited and are generally categorized according to the type of transformation being considered such as P2P, P2V or V2V, or by the requirements of an individual’s role or focus, such as capacity planning, risk management or compliance reporting.

CiRBA has also broadened the range of users within IT that can leverage the software’s advanced analytics by introducing intuitive graphical dashboards and flexible email notifications. For example, a senior manager may wish to monitor risk through one of two risk oriented dashboards that provides an overall assessment of current and projected risk levels within virtualized infrastructure. CiRBA’s color-coded maps and detailed roadmap reports continue to provide a unique way of visualizing and understanding consolidation opportunities within an environment.

Support for Financial Analysis
As the size and scope of virtualization programs grow, organizations are putting greater emphasis on accurately determining the initial and long term financial impact of these initiatives. Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) play an important role in determining which transformation strategies, platforms, targets and placements represent the best choices in conjunction with other key decision criteria such as business constraints, technical constraints, utilization, and power consumption.

CiRBA Version 5.0 introduces integrated financial analysis by enabling the results of an analysis to be directly inserted into any Excel-based financial model. CiRBA 5.0 includes a default model that provides a comprehensive TCO/ROI calculation, factoring in both capital and operational savings, and applies hardware, power, facilities and staff costs to analysis results to determine the true financial profile of each strategy being considered.

Power Consumption Analysis
Rising energy costs and increasing interest in reducing the carbon footprint of operations have led organizations to seek out new ways to reduce power consumption. CiRBA Version 5.0 provides the ability to analyze both measured and estimated power draw for individual IT systems, and rolls these measures up to overall utilization for groups of servers and entire data centers. Aggregate utilization analyses are automatically generated for P2P, P2V and V2V scenarios, detailing before and after consumption levels to reveal the impact of each possible transformation on power consumption.