Robin Wauters

CiRBA today announced the release of CiRBA Version 5.1.  With Version 5.1, CiRBA provides advanced analytics and collaborative capabilities that enable enterprise views of capacity health for both physical and virtual infrastructure.

The widespread adoption of virtualization and consolidation technologies has provided unprecedented opportunities for organizations to increase efficiency within data centers.  However, these technologies have had a significant impact on the way capacity supply and demand is managed.  Virtual infrastructure is often a pooled resource serving different business users, impacting the roles and informational requirements of architects, application owners, and server administrators. Additionally, to facilitate enterprise level planning efforts, organizations require aggregate views of environments that allow them to manage IT services efficiently and safely.

Key features added to CiRBA Version 5.1 include:

Enabling Enterprise Level Capacity Planning through a Single, Open Capacity Database
CiRBA Version 5.1 includes several data-level integration enhancements that enable CiRBA to be used as a centralized repository for enterprise capacity data. By leveraging CiRBA’s advanced repository design, this new facility combines efficient centralized storage of capacity data with open data access capabilities to form the foundation of enterprise capacity management.

Improving Workload Placement and Resource Allocation Decisions through Capacity Status Analysis & New Dashboards
CiRBA’s new Capacity Status Analysis assesses the health of IT environments, both from a historical and forward-looking trend perspective.  This analysis enables organizations to continually assess how much capacity is required and where it should be allocated to meet projected demand. These new capabilities leverage CiRBA’s advanced pattern-based workload analysis to allow users to define thresholds and risk tolerances. By continually assessing these criteria, CiRBA automatically generates alerts to provide visibility into and/or early warning of potential problems.

Capacity Status analysis reporting enables organizations to track risk levels through aggregate and single system views. When used in conjunction with the new Capacity Manager Dashboard, CiRBA provides a consolidated view of capacity supply and demand, enabling users to accurately right-size environments and avoid over-provisioning hardware and software.

Enabling Collaboration on Capacity Decisions through Pending Optimization Reporting
Virtual machine management systems are often the domain of system administrators and fall short in providing the insight required by the broad spectrum of stakeholders involved in capacity decision making. In addition, changes to environments typically happen without the involvement of application owners, creating friction and causing key business constraints to be overlooked. CiRBA enables users to review specific action plans that result from what-if analysis thereby facilitating collaboration between groups by automatically communicating proposed and pending changes.  This ensures that all stakeholders are aware of virtualization plans, hardware refresh schedules, and other pending optimizations that affect their application systems.

Facilitating Communication and Reporting through Configurable Dashboards and Integrations to Third-Party Data and Portals
Critical to facilitating collaboration on capacity-related decisions is the ability to deliver relevant content in a convenient location to a variety of users including capacity managers, application owners, and senior managers. CiRBA Version 5.1 includes flexible UI components that enable organizations to incorporate CiRBA reports and intelligence into existing intranet portals or role-specific dashboards.

CiRBA Version 5.1 will be available January 30, 2009.