Case Studies at CiRBA

Looking Beyond Workloads When
Planning Virtualization Initiatives

When a free capacity planning tool returned an unworkable analysis, CiRBA stepped in to help a leading Canadian supplier of heating, cooling and security systems achieve a 66% consolidation rate. Using CiRBA for ongoing management of the newly virtualized environment has also enabled the organization to establish new business processes for rationalizing hardware purchases, avoiding resprawl and virtual sprawl, and integrating the IT environments of future corporate acquisitions.

The organization was challenged by limited space and ever increasing costs in its’ data centers. Virtualization was identified as a key strategy to address both these issues. For help, the organization initially turned to the consulting arm of a hardware vendor with whom they had a long standing relationship.

Leveraging a capacity planning approach to conduct an analysis of the environment, the consultants recommended an 89% consolidation rate. When examining the results of the analysis more closely, the organization found that the workload based assessment placed development, disaster recovery and production servers together, which would put the organization’s key systems at risk. Also included in the recommended targets for virtualization were applications that could not be virtualized due to the legacy systems they were running on. The analysis didn’t account for system configurations or business factors that were of critical importance to the success of the initiative. What was presented was a single scenario rather than the ability to explore other possibilities. The organization was left searching for a way to find an optimal, but realistic, solution that could provide it with an actionable plan given its requirements.

CiRBA’s Data Center Intelligence software was brought in to perform the analysis. The comprehensive analysis factored in the unique business, configuration and workload constraints facing the organization. After auditing the environment and determining the optimal combinations of servers and workloads through “What-if” analysis, the organization had a detailed plan that provided a 66% consolidation rate and manageable risk levels. CiRBA’s analysis also clearly identified systems that weren’t candidates for virtualization and those that needed to be kept separate in order to reduce risk and establish a manageable infrastructure.

CiRBA’s analysis enabled the organization to achieve its objectives, maximizing consolidation rates while honoring the unique constraints of the environment. CiRBA will continue to play a key role over the long term. Leveraging CiRBA’s analytical models, the organization has built new business processes around hardware rationalization and the creation of new VMs. In addition, the organization plans to triple in size over the next five years through acquisitions. CiRBA will be instrumental in integrating the IT environments of acquired businesses to ensure the data centers remain optimized.