CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software, today announced the general availability of Version 7.0 of CiRBA DCI-Control, which revolutionizes how organizations control virtual and cloud infrastructure. CiRBA's new Control Console enables IT organizations to see in a single glance where attention is required at the VM, host, and cluster level, and then provides explicit instructions on what to do in order to eliminate risk and increase efficiency.

"CiRBA's Control Console is the brain for new school data centers, giving an unprecedented level of control over virtualized infrastructure," said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO, CiRBA. "The ability to know precisely where to place workloads and how to allocate resources enables organizations to run leaner data centers and achieve their financial objectives for virtualization and cloud computing. CiRBA has removed the guesswork from operations by providing answers according to an organization's operational policies and workload requirements. For the first time, infrastructure managers know exactly what needs to be done to operate efficient, worry-free virtualized infrastructure."

"CiRBA Version 7.0 enables infrastructure owners to quickly and easily understand what is going on in virtual and cloud infrastructure and what they need to do to improve the current and future state of operations," said Rachel Chalmers, Research Director Infrastructure Management for 451 Research. "CiRBA just gets visualization in a way that other companies don't."

Having Just the Right Amount of Infrastructure

Most organizations today combat risk in virtualized infrastructure by over-provisioning. Excess capacity and overly-conservative allocations create a costly buffer zone that erodes the ROI of virtualization and clouds. CiRBA's Control Console reveals whether or not VMs, hosts or clusters have "Too Little Infrastructure" (resources in the red band), "Too Much Infrastructure" (resources in the yellow band) or are "Just Right" (resources in the green band). This provides a simple means of understanding what is at risk, what is inefficient, and where action needs to be taken. Infrastructure managers use the Spectrum view and explicit actions provided by CiRBA to work toward a simple goal of moving all of the entities in an environment into the green. This powerful management paradigm radically changes the way infrastructure requirements are viewed and managed, highlighting waste and inefficiency and the steps required to address these issues in a way not previously possible.

Predictive Analytics

Users can also see an environment's status and requirements over time by leveraging historical, current and predictive views through the Control Console. The predictive analytics incorporate "Bookings" to reserve capacity for new workloads and hosts coming online (or systems leaving the environment) so that a comprehensive, forward-looking view is provided. This helps to ensure enough capacity is budgeted and the guesswork of determining future requirements is eliminated. The Action System in the Control Console leverages these analytics to provide users with details and automation options for workload placement changes, resource allocation changes and capacity changes recommended to optimize an environment.

Comprehensive Policy-Based Control

Only CiRBA's analytics model an organization's business and operational policies so that requirements for SLAs, regulations, DR, HA, and other critical criteria are reflected, measured and complied with to ensure low risk, highly actionable answers. Policies effectively form a "contract" that ensures the safe operation and appropriate placement of workloads. With Version 7.0, CiRBA has delivered a powerful new Policy Manager so that organizations can easily apply, tune and control policies.

CiRBA Version 7.0 ships with six standard policies based on best practices that are easily configured and applied through the Policy Manager. These policies include Production Critical, Production IT, Production Cloud, Production Batch / HPC, Pre-Production, and Dev / Test. Settings available through these policies relate to guest density, guest performance, availability, placement volatility, operational windowing, resource reclamation, compliance and automation.

"With increased adoption of shared resources in today's IT environments, organizations simply cannot address the complexity introduced by workload mobility, dynamic resource allocations, and the need for agile decision-making using existing monitoring and capacity management tools," said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO, CiRBA. "It is only by leveraging predictive analytics that understand all of the workload requirements, constraints, patterns and policies, and using this to guide and automate workload placement and resource allocation, that organizations will achieve their goals of reduced infrastructure costs and increased agility."