Cirba Inc., the leading provider of software-defined infrastructure control solutions, today released integration to EMC ViPR SRM, enabling organizations to optimize use of storage resources through smarter workload placements and visibility into storage health. The new integration adds to Cirba's existing support for placing workloads and optimizing infrastructure considering datastore requirements and physical storage resources managed by NetApp OnCommand Insight (OCI), which was announced in August 2015. 

With this new release, Cirba's analytics uniquely enable organizations to make better use of storage resources monitored by EMC SRM by determining the optimal host environment for the workload based on multiple factors including detailed storage requirements, workload utilization, business, technical, and software licensing. Cirba's VM placements ensure the right match between workload requirements and available storage capacity and tiers. It also keeps the use of these resources balanced with the use of compute resources across the enterprise to free up stranded capacity. Cirba also provides virtual and cloud infrastructure management teams with visibility into when resource shortfalls might adversely affect associated VMs and where excess resources exist in the storage resources attached to EMC SRM.

"Through the integration with Cirba, the valuable data available in EMC ViPR SRM can now be analyzed to drive strategic hosting decisions, enabling policy-driven workload routing, future capacity reservation, and detailed placement of virtual machines based on their precise compute and storage requirements," said Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-Founder of Cirba. "And because SRM supports multivendor storage environments, this enables enterprise-wide optimization and balancing of the use of storage resources, predictive analysis of potential shortfalls, and comprehensive visibility back to the lines of business."

EMC ViPR SRM is used to manage storage resources for traditional and next-generation cloud storage platforms. Cirba aids organizations with EMC ViPR SRM by helping them:

• Route workloads to the right host environment considering complex storage requirements. Cirba's analytics optimize VM routing and placement decisions considering all workload requirements, including complex storage needs such as multi-disk requirements, storage tiering, and interconnect bandwidth usage. This ensures workloads have access to the resources required without over-specifying and over-allocating.
• Reserve physical and virtual storage capacity for planned workload deployments in the right environments. Cirba provides a comprehensive picture of demand on storage assets including current demand and planned demand in the future leveraging these reservations. This enables purchasing plans to be confidently made without over-provisioning.
• Ongoing visibility and control: Cirba models the complete storage picture linking physical storage to logical datastores and the VMs connected to those resources, alerting users to which VMs may be at risk of a shortfall and where excess resources exist. This includes analyzing multi-level thin-provisioning, as well as the performance and health at each level.