Cirba, Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software, today announced the general availability of CiRBA 6.0. With this latest version, CiRBA provides an enterprise solution for efficiency management that meets the evolving demands of managing cloud and virtualized infrastructure. Version 6.0 combines cross-platform analytics with customizable role-based dashboards that increase visibility and control over the efficiency and risk of systems.

CiRBA 6.0 was specifically designed to support the changing dynamics of infrastructure management, including the increased use of virtualization and Cloud-based business models. To effectively manage these environments, organizations must be able to make faster decisions within very fluid environments, have access to accurate, reliable information, and be able to communicate effectively with the various stakeholders that impact decisions or policies governing environments. CiRBA’s new dashboards deliver role-based views of efficiency and risks that offer accurate, actionable answers. CiRBA helps to automate the decision-making process leaving less to the interpretation of the user, thereby saving time, increasing accuracy and reducing risk.

Dashboard view examples include:

• CIO / Executive views that provide overall measures of efficiency and risk across all platforms, vendors, and lines of business. This includes the ability to see how much capacity is utilized to service the business, how much extra is required to meet policy, HA and DR requirements and how much is truly spare or excess. This higher level view is then supported by detailed recommendations as to how to improve these ratios.
• Infrastructure and operations manager views that continuously report detailed use of capacity, workload rebalancing opportunities, capacity efficiency recommendations, potential capacity shortfalls, resource misallocations, host and guest configuration risks, and new workload placement strategies. These views may also include advanced resiliency analysis, such as simulated cabinet/PDU/site failure, to provide daily insight into readiness and potential exposure.
• Capacity manager views that provide normalized analysis of supply and demand at the cluster, application and business service level. This includes demand trending and forecasting based on both historical data, as well as models of anticipated business changes and activity, providing insight into saturation points that dictate when new hardware or cloud capacity will be required.
• Cloud infrastructure manager views, which focus on the measurement of “whitespace” within compute pools, the maintenance of demand buffers to absorb new workloads, the rapid placement of new workloads based on self-service models, and the reservation of capacity based on known or anticipated demands. These elements extend the base infrastructure management functions to enable higher agility in the management of Cloud environments.
• Application Owner / Line of Business views that provide simplified access to activity levels, trends, risks and opportunities. These views are designed to provide broad information delivery with little or no familiarity with the underlying analysis models, thus providing insight well beyond the core IT users.

“As virtualization and Cloud adoption increase, we have seen a broader group of individuals needing to track efficiency and risk related metrics,” said Andrew Hillier, CIRBA CTO and Co-founder. “For many organizations this consumes huge amounts of time. Those relying on manual approaches and spreadsheets simply cannot aggregate the required data, analyze it accurately, and provide answers with any level of reliability. Organizations are exposed to significant risk and cost by leaving the analysis to error-prone, time-consuming, unreliable methods.”

In addition to the new customizable, role-based dashboards, Version 6.0 provides:

• New Intelligence Catalog consisting of customizable bookmarked links that take a user directly to any element an analyst wants to share. Bookmarks can be leveraged for quick access to any CiRBA data element.
• Enhanced reporting that enables results to be automatically generated and made available to users. Reports can also be published directly in formats such as Word, PowerPoint and CSV to increase the ability to share analysis results.
• New Answer Quality Rating that enables analysts and consumers of answers to quickly determine if a given analysis meets the standards for quality as established by the organization. This rating is based on the amount and type of data available, the type of analysis, and thresholds and settings as determined by the analyst. Answer Quality Ratings ensure that when infrastructure decisions are made, they are based on the best possible answers.

“Reliable and actionable answers require highly detailed, recent and complete data. CiRBA is the only solution that provides a quality rating that shows the users of the answers that all of these requirements have been met. Without this, in many cases analysts may be trusting answers that are invalid, unreliable or just plain risky. CiRBA enables organizations to avoid costly problems such as over-provisioning, performance issues, and downtime that arise from acting on poor quality analyses,” said Hillier.

CiRBA’s Version 6.0 builds on the only cross-platform analytics solution that enables organizations to safely maximize the efficiency of Cloud-based, virtualized and physical infrastructure by determining what the right host infrastructure is, how much is required, how it should be allocated, and where to place workloads in order to maximize utilization. CiRBA’s policy-driven multi-dimensional analysis simultaneously examines detailed configuration data, business policies and utilization patterns and personalities. It is only through looking at the intersection of these three types of constraints that organizations’ can control risk while optimizing the efficiency and manageability of infrastructure.