The Efficiency and Risk Spectrum is used to model an environment that may consist of multiple clusters or groups of systems, and show whether the clusters, hosts and VMs (or guests) are under-provisioned, optimally provisioned, or over-provisioned. By graphically representing the provisioning status, an Infrastructure Manager can instantly see where they should take action to remediate under-provisioning issues and understand where they may be able to reclaim capacity for redeployment or to host new workloads.

“One of the most common situations we see when looking at virtual environments is over-provisioning at the cluster level combined with under-provisioning at the VM level,” said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA. “I refer to this as the “silent killer” because it is difficult to detect – the cluster looks healthy and has plenty of capacity but individual guests are constrained, potentially causing performance problems. The new Efficiency and Risk Spectrum provides an intuitive visualization of all the components in a virtual environment, making situations like these easy to spot.”

The Efficiency and Risk Spectrum is powered by CiRBA analytics that can be easily configured to match the unique policies established for each environment, host or guest. Organizations determine policies or thresholds that define what the optimal allocation of capacity is for a system or group of systems based on their SLA requirements, purpose, operational policies, etc. This enables organizations to see their environment in the context of their own unique requirements, and is immensely powerful in providing visibility into infrastructure and allocation requirements that previously didn’t exist in the market. The Spectrum is a useful tool for Infrastructure Managers wanting to see an environment’s status on a daily basis or for capacity planners and architects that want to leverage it for assessing the current state and future requirements for planning processes.

The Efficiency and Risk dashboard also provides views of CiRBA’s unique “fully-loaded utilization” measurement of server efficiency that measures the capacity required to service workloads based on their resource utilization, business, and operational policies. The dashboard also reflects CiRBA’s Server Capacity Defrag analysis, which provides specific recommendations on where to place workloads in order to safely optimize efficiency. Server Capacity Defrag is not disk defrag. Server Capacity Defrag is the act of maximizing density in virtualized infrastructure by strategically placing workloads in order to make the best possible use of server resources. The dashboard offers specific infrastructure recommendations to further optimize environments such as upgrading CPU or adding memory capacity, in order to provide a detailed roadmap to an efficient and safe data center.

CiRBA DCI is the only cross-platform analytics software solution that enables organizations to safely maximize the efficiency of Cloud-based, virtualized and physical infrastructure by determining the best host infrastructure for workloads, how much is required, how it should be allocated, and where to place workloads in order to maximize utilization. CiRBA DCI is used by organizations to plan transformations, migrate platforms, and manage the efficiency and risk of infrastructure on an ongoing basis.