Cirba updates data center analysis software

Ontario software maker Cirba is looking to make data center consolidation and server virtualization projects easier to plan and better suited to business needs with an upgraded version of its flagship product.

The company this week is set to make available Data Center Intelligence (DCI) 4.0, which Cirba executives say provides more interactive analysis capabilities. The company added such features to enable customers to analyze more "what if" scenarios, such as how to configure existing infrastructure or engineer a new server or application rollout.Cirba also added business priorities and objective analysis to its technology that in the past primarily analyzed configurations and workloads to determine the best-case scenario for customers.

"Our software helps enterprise and other customers address the problem of server sprawl. We provide analysis on the configurations, workloads and business factors existing within their environment and how they can get more utilization out of their existing infrastructure," says Andrew Hillier, company co-founder and CTO.

DCI collects myriad configuration data and performance metrics from IP-addressable devices such as servers and switches, and processes the information to help data center managers determine the best consolidation scenarios, for instance. The software delivers reports, or scorecards, on optimal configurations and potential areas for server consolidation, virtualization, application stacking and workload deployment, the company says. DCI 4.0 does not act on the proposed actions or problem remediation.

DCI 4.0 is installed on a server or groups of servers and collects configuration and other data from endpoints using distributed software agents. The software also includes prebuilt rules about various applications, systems and other elements to help customers avoid some common "gotchas" when working to consolidate resources. The software, through the interactive user interface, churns the data collected so IT managers get an up-to-date and accurate depiction of their IT resources, Cirba says.

With this release, Cirba says it enables customers to work interactively with more up-to-date configuration and infrastructure data, which industry watchers say would help even experienced systems integrators when proposing server consolidation and other optimization projects.

"Folks like Accenture do a good job of architecting big server consolidation projects, but even they could use a tool like this to identify the best targets for consolidation. By the time a big [systems integrator] completes its analysis of the data center, things have already changed," says George Hamilton, director of Yankee Group's Enabling Technologies Enterprise Group. "IT can also run the software routinely to constantly be looking for excess/redundant capacity. Virtualization is still predominantly in test and development environments. As it becomes more broadly deployed in production, this type of tool will be increasingly valuable and necessary."