CiRBA Announces Analytics That Drive Best Practices for Virtualization Analysis.

CiRBA 5.2 incorporates best practice templates for X86 and UNIX virtualization and enhanced data collection management

TORONTO -- CiRBA Inc., a leader in data center intelligence software, today announced the release of CiRBA Version 5.2. With Version 5.2, CiRBA has added a six step process and templates for virtualization analysis that ensures organizations can transform infrastructure quickly, safely and cost-effectively. Version 5.2 also provides enhanced data collection management features so that analysis is as accurate and efficient as possible.

"Through our work with global customers, CiRBA has identified the key steps required for successful virtualization. These six steps ensure that essential constraints and risk factors are considered in virtualization planning," said Chuck Tatham, CIRBA Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. "Many organizations are behind where they want to be in deployment of virtualization due to the complexity and sensitivity of making broad changes to production infrastructure. These steps enable our customers and partners to find the safest path to virtualization transformations and move forward with speed and confidence."

CiRBA's data center intelligence software provides an analytics platform for planning transformations, including virtualization, and making capacity and workload placement related decisions. CiRBA's rules-driven analysis offers the flexibility to develop custom rules and analysis templates or leverage packaged ones built by CiRBA. CiRBA has developed a new series of analysis templates that embody a six step process for virtualization analysis including:

Step 1: Candidate qualification: Determine which workloads make good or bad candidates for virtualization by analyzing for risk factors within configurations and utilization patterns

Step 2: Workload sizing: Size an environment to understand the best approach given the profile or personality of workloads

Step 3: Detailed analysis: Determine which technical and business constraints are important for a given set of workloads through extensive, automated what-if analysis

Step 4: Solution design: Optimize software, hardware, capacity, and placement decisions and infrastructure design by fine-tuning and selecting between alternative scenarios

Step 5: Implementation: Track progress at any point and monitor performance during the transformation with up-to-date data

Step 6: Process improvement: Track changes in the environment and accommodate these in further rounds of transformation planning and modeling to drive even greater accuracy

By applying these steps to virtualization initiatives, the resulting environments are not only properly sized but are also compliant with business policies, tuned to specific risk tolerances, SLA requirements, and guided by lessons learned in previous implementations. The overall result is lower risk, higher efficiency and ultimately more rapid deployment of virtualization.

Initially CiRBA will ship six step analysis templates for VMware physical to virtual transformation analysis, with templates for other platforms such as Hyper-V, Xen, AIX and Solaris to be released this fall. CiRBA currently supports and provides existing rules and analysis templates that accommodate analysis for all virtualization variants on most platforms.

The six step analysis process employs a comprehensive approach that drives out the risks and inefficiencies inherent in the simple workload sizing estimates that are commonly leveraged by many systems integrators, hardware and software companies that conduct quick analyses for clients. In addition, as part of this process, CiRBA analyses determine actual optimal placements of workloads and detailed remediation plans. Unlike the high level sizing recommendations, this output represents actionable plans that can be immediately executed upon with confidence.

"Data center managers are looking for analysis capabilities that match the complexity and sensitivity of their infrastructure," said Tatham. "Best guesses or throw away assessments are no longer good enough as virtualization is taken into production environments. Decisions made in these transformations can not only make or break the business return of doing the transformation; they also have major impact on performance and risk. Our built-in steps ensure that nothing is missed in the process and the results live up to the expectation of the impact of virtualization."

CiRBA Version 5.2 also streamlines data collection management with the introduction of audit workspaces. These workspaces enable organizations to model an environment and apply audit templates to a defined set of targets thereby simplifying auditing processes and enabling the tracking and management of errors and status through intuitive reporting.

CiRBA Version 5.2 will be available September 21, 2009.

About CiRBA Inc.

CiRBA is a leading provider of Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software that enables leading systems integrators and Global 5000 organizations to determine the fastest and safest path to a highly efficient data center. CiRBA is the only solution that simultaneously analyzes configuration, business, and utilization constraints using flexible and sophisticated rules to optimize transformations within data centers. For more information, visit www.cirba.com.