CiRBA Introduces new Virtual and Cloud Infrastructure metric

According to CiRBA, fully-loaded utilization provides a precise measurement of server infrastructure requirements that factors in utilisation patterns, technical constraints and business and operational policies at the same time. Leveraging this measure, organisations can identify exactly how much infrastructure is required to safely service workloads, allowing excess capacity to be accurately measured and reclaimed for other purposes.

“CPU, memory, and IO utilisation metrics only tell part of the story when it comes to efficiency and infrastructure requirements,” said Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA. “The real question is how many servers are required to safely host a set of workloads, and how this compares to the number of servers that are actually deployed.  If more servers are deployed than are needed, then there is an opportunity to increase efficiency, either by reclaiming servers or adding more VMs.  If, on the other hand, analysis shows that no servers can be removed without adversely affecting the applications, then the environment is running as efficiently as it can be, regardless of what the per cent CPU utilisation is.  Unfortunately, very few environments are at that level of efficiency, and it is not uncommon for us to go into an environment and find that they have purchased twice the hardware they actually need.”

CiRBA’s fully-loaded utilization metric is available with CiRBA Version 6.1 through a new Efficiency and Risk dashboard. The dashboard provides trend-based views of the capacity required to service both the workload utilisation and policy requirements. By modelling these two measurements distinctly and applying them against infrastructure supply, organisations gain a graphical view of how much spare capacity exists over time. The dashboard also provides comparative measures against the actual busiest day in history and a perfect storm scenario in which all workloads hit their peak at the same time, enabling infrastructure managers to confidently make decisions as to how to reallocate excess capacity and to predict when new capacity will be needed.

For more information, visit www.cirba.com. Follow CiRBA on Twitter at www.twitter.com/CiRBA.