CiRBA on Wednesday announced the general availability of Version 7.1 of the CiRBA Control Console, enabling IT organizations to optimize capacity decisions, VM placements and resource allocations for AIX-based IBM PowerVM environments. This latest version allows customers to leverage the same technology they use to optimize VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments to manage virtualized AIX infrastructure.

According to Andrew Hillier, CiRBA CTO and co-founder, "It becomes an analytics challenge, and the key is to strike the optimal balance of efficiency and risk given the infrastructure capabilities, the requirements of the workloads being hosted, and the policies governing the relationship between the two."

CiRBA Version 7.1 reduces the complexity of capacity management for virtualized AIX environments with analytics software that natively understands the advanced capabilities of the PowerVM platform such as Logical Partitions (LPARs), Virtual I/O Servers (VIOS), shared processor pools and HA failover nodes. By combining these capabilities with historical utilization data and detailed operational policies, CiRBA's Control Console provides unprecedented visibility into infrastructure health for VMs, hosts and host groups, and generates the detailed actions required to optimize workload placements, resource allocations and other critical capacity decisions. Leveraging CiRBA, organizations no longer have to sacrifice efficiency in order to meet the service level requirements of the mission-critical applications that run on IBM AIX and PowerVM.

"AIX and PowerVM provide tremendous flexibility, performance and reliability for mission-critical applications, but until now IT organizations have had to manage them with relatively basic tools and manual processes," noted Hillier, "Planning workload placements with Post-itÒ notes and using home grown spreadsheet models to size infrastructure simply isn't sustainable, particularly as these environments become more and more sophisticated."

CiRBA's analytics use comprehensive policies that determine where workloads and applications should be placed within the infrastructure and how much resource should be allocated to VMs (LPARs), VIOS, and resource pools. Out-of-the-box, CiRBA provides specific policies governing SLA requirements, High Availability, host resource utilization thresholds, VM allocation thresholds, security and compliance, licensing, and placement constraints, so organizations can confidently place mission critical applications into PowerVM environments and optimize their density without incurring risk. Smarter placements, accurate allocations and increased density not only enable organizations to defer purchases by making the best use of existing infrastructure, but can also result in significant savings in terms of software licensing costs.