CiRBA, a leading provider of Automated Capacity Control software, today announced a new Reservation Console that enables organizations to automate new workload routing and capacity reservations processes. The console automates what is a manual process today of selecting the optimal hosting environment for new workloads, reserving compute and storage capacity in advance of use, and ultimately providing the detailed host level placement recommendations for the workload.

The Reservation Console features a new, tunable scoring system that scientifically identifies the optimal destination environment for new workloads. The system provides a new Hosting Score, which is based on a range of criteria including occupancy levels, technical considerations, software licensing constraints, operational policies, and regulatory compliance. Organizations can modify the attributes considered and also tune their weighting so that recommendations are aligned with organizational goals and application owner preferences. Not only does this ensure that the requirements of each workload are properly matched to the characteristics of the infrastructure, eliminating compliance issues and reducing operational risk, but it also enables the Reservation Console to balance demand across all available infrastructure, including cloud environments, midrange systems, and even different physical data centers.

And as its name suggests, the new Reservation Console also provides users with a new avenue to reserve capacity in advance of its actual use, guaranteeing that resources will be available for application deployments and effectively acting as a "hotel reservation system" to application groups and lines of business. The new console complements the environment-level CiRBA Booking Management System by providing users with visibility into all inbound capacity reservation requests and all available environments, enabling routing and reservations into the best environment for each request. This not only increases customer confidence but also enables highly accurate forecasting of capacity requirements, avoiding expenditures on unnecessary hardware and software.

"Many internal cloud platforms focus on automating the process of provisioning capacity in a specific target environment, but this is actually a small part of the overall picture," said Andrew Hillier, Co-founder and CTO of CiRBA. "It still forces organizations to figure out which environment, geography and hosting technology is best for an application or request. This is a time consuming, inaccurate and highly manual process, and the Reservation Console solves this by automating the process of evaluating hosting options, routing capacity requests and reserving capacity in the target environment."

CiRBA's Reservation Console

The Reservation Console leverages CiRBA's workload routing API released in June that enables placement recommendations to be fed directly from CiRBA through to cloud management platforms, such as OpenStack, filling a critical gap in the automation of self-service and planned workload placement requests.

The new Reservation Console works alongside CiRBA's award winning Capacity Control Console which provides daily optimization of workload placements and sizing through rebalancing and VM right-sizing instructions that are fed into hypervisor management solutions. Automation of capacity reservations through the Reservation Console feeds the Capacity Control Console's capacity bookings and forecasting capabilities to ensure infrastructure and capacity managers get an accurate picture of future infrastructure requirements that includes both trends and planned projects. This effectively closes the loop on CiRBA's unique end-to-end model for transforming, controlling and predicting capacity.

CiRBA's new Reservation Console will be available in November 2013.