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.