CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software, today announced the release of CiRBA Version 5.3. With Version 5.3, CiRBA has advanced data validation reporting and incorporated market-leading relative performance coverage from Ideas International Limited (IDEAS) to further enhance the quality and accuracy of the solution’s market-leading analytics. In addition, CiRBA is now the only solution that considers application dependencies in transformation planning processes enabling organizations to confidently consolidate complex, business critical applications.
“Simply stated, it is impossible to create trustworthy analysis results using poor data”
Supporting Consolidation of Complex Applications through Analysis of Application Dependencies
Application dependencies play a key role in data center consolidation and virtualization initiatives. Various components of a business application may be housed on different servers, and these connections need to be understood during the consolidation planning process so that performance and operations are not adversely impacted by poor workload placement choices. This is particularly important with business critical applications in production environments. With Version 5.3, CiRBA enables organizations to capture, report on, and consider TCP/IP connections and business service membership of applications so that the full extent of relevant dependencies can be understood and accounted for in the planning process. This information is used in early planning stages to identify move groups and consolidation phases or waves.
CiRBA allows organizations to take advantage of native data collection methods to capture the required TCP/IP connection data or leverage an enhanced integration to IBM’s TivoliApplicationDependencyDiscoveryManager (TADDM). CiRBA’s updated integration to TADDM now provides access to TCP/IP and configuration data captured by the tool so organizations can take advantage of data repositories that already exist within an environment.
“As organizations tackle the increasingly complex applications in their consolidation initiatives, they need to consider all facets of the targeted systems,” said Andrew Hillier, CIRBA CTO and Co-Founder. “Application dependency is one area that is commonly dealt with in a manual fashion. Only CiRBA integrates application dependencies with detailed transformation analysis to ensure that organizations can rely on a single solution for consolidation planning.”
Streamlined Data Validation with Analysis Data Coverage Reporting
Many consolidation initiatives fail or encounter major stumbling blocks because analyses and plans were based on insufficient or poor quality data. In Version 5.3, CiRBA leverages its intelligent analytics to assess the quality of data available for analysis. Data validation processes are streamlined through a new Analysis Data Coverage report that analyzes the suitability of collected data for a specific type of analysis. This benefits users throughout the entire data collection phase of an initiative as it enables a fast assessment of the quality of business attribute, configuration, and utilization data for the chosen analysis strategy.
“Simply stated, it is impossible to create trustworthy analysis results using poor data,” said Hillier. “Organizations using other approaches often get caught in a trap of relying on best efforts and are forced to move ahead on analyses and plans without really understanding what they are working with. Analysis Data Coverage capabilities in Version 5.3 provide an easy way for users to assess data quality within hours of beginning the collection process and throughout the entire data collection process to ensure data quality in the context of the chosen analysis strategy. CiRBA sets the standard for data collection and data validation with our market-leading capabilities. We will continue to invest in technologies and methodologies to streamline the process of capturing, qualifying and using data in analysis.”
Integration of Industry-Leading Relative Performance Data for Increased Model Coverage
CiRBA has also licensed and integrated server performance ranking data from IDEAS using the Relative Performance Estimate (RPE2) and Environmental Database for transformation and ongoing efficiency analyses. RPE2 provides comparable performance information for server consolidation studies and for the initial evaluation phase of server selection. RPE2 incorporates a composite workload profile comprising six industry benchmarks; full coverage for all leading vendor server families and variants; and coverage of current and older models. Utilization of the IDEAS’ performance ranking data provides CiRBA users with answers based on the most comprehensive relative performance data set available, saving them time and increasing the accuracy of analysis results when making decisions regarding data center transformations.
CiRBA Version 5.3 is available May 10, 2010.
About CiRBA Inc.
CiRBA is a leading provider of Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software that enables leading systems integrators and Global 5000 organizations to safely maximize efficiency through the intelligent planning and management of physical and virtual infrastructure. Only CiRBA’s policy-driven, multi-dimensional analytics answer the questions of where to place workloads and how to allocate and configure resources. For more information, visit www.cirba.com.