Virtualization & Consolidation Planning
The complexity that hides beneath the covers in today’s data center poses a serious threat to the success of any consolidation initiative. Many organizations assume that virtualization and consolidation planning is an exercise in fitting virtual servers together on physical infrastructure. These capacity-centric approaches don’t consider various strategies, technology options or platforms. Not only are the wrong purchase decisions made, artificially inflating the costs of virtualization, but often the wrong servers and applications are virtualized and incompatible servers are placed together.
Reducing Risk
CiRBA is the only solution that analyzes all the critical configuration and non-technical constraints within the environment in addition to utilization patterns and personalities. CiRBA’s multi-dimensional analysis ensures that workload placements respect critical concerns such as business processes, security and compliance rules, and are placed far from their disaster recovery or cluster/replication counterparts.
Maximizing Efficiency & Savings
CiRBA's analysis provides a vendor-neutral view of your environment and the unique characteristics that each virtualization technology offers, enabling organizations to determine which hypervisor is best for your organization and how much hardware (if any) and software you really require. Using CiRBA, organizations can evaluate any virtualization or hardware platform, including mainframes, according to financial objectives, workload personalities, risk tolerance, service level agreements and performance requirements. In addition, CiRBA provides the most sophisticated utilization analysis available to accurately model workloads and properly size environments according to risk tolerance, financial returns, performance and SLA requirements – so that you never over-provision.
Getting You There Faster
CiRBA relies on template-driven analysis of empirical data so there is very little delay between targeting a group of servers and having an actionable plan. Unlike manually intensive analysis approaches, CiRBA provides answers quickly so that action can be taken and savings realized.
CiRBA’s Six Step Virtualization Analysis Process
Whether analyzing for VMware, Citrix, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Zones, IBM LPARS and WPARS or mainframes, CiRBA quickly finds the lowest risk, maximum impact transformation. To achieve this CiRBA employs a six step process for virtualization analysis:
Process improvement
Update models to reflect actual operations and ensure greater accuracy in subsequent rollout phases
Implementation
Identify appropriate changes to servers prior to and update analysis to detect any changes within the environment to reduce risk and speed rollout
Solution design
Model unlimited final scenarios to determine optimal workload placements, utilization targets, cluster design, hardware platform selection, capital purchases, service levels, and ROI
Detailed analysis
Determine sensitivity to various constraints to understand limiting factors and opportunities within consolidation scenarios
Workload sizing
Develop rough estimates for hardware sizing as a starting point for analysis and understand total aggregate utilization through workload only analysis
Candidate qualification
Determine true candidates for virtualization by analyzing for virtualization, configuration and utilization risks
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 Download the CiRBA Six Step Virtualization Analysis Process PDF
Streamlining Scope Definition for Wave Planning and Move Groups in Complex Environments
Large production environments in particular require a strategic approach to deciding which systems to target for consolidation, when. CiRBA makes determining phases, also known as wave planning, easy through its Discovered Systems Explorer which provides visibility into the systems in an environment and enables the slicing and dicing of infrastructure views so that organizations can understand exactly what exists and develop a strategy. Through its Data Center Explorer and Dependencies report, CiRBA also provides visibility into application dependencies according to TCP connectivity or business system membership so that move groups can be identified and considered as part of the wave planning effort.
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