CiRBA Adds Reservation Console For Virtual Machine Workloads

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CiRBA’s new Reservation Console enables organizations to automate new workload routing to the best cloud environment based on a comprehensive scoring mechanism and capacity reservations. (Image: CiRBA)

Capacity management software provider CiRBA is adding a brand new Reservation Console to fill a critical gap in enterprise operations, addressing the need for automation of VM routing and capacity bookings. The company has tackled the rise of the virtual machine and how enterprises manage operations in an increasingly complex world. The reservation console will be available in November 2013.

The reservation console allows users to reserve capacity - so it’s not just a clever name - in advance of its actual use. Co-founder and CTO Andrew Hillier uses a hotel reservation system as an analogy. The new console complements the environment-level CiRBA Booking Management System by providing users with visibility into all inbound capacity reservation requests and all available environments, enabling routing and reservations into the best environment for each request. It’s good for confidence, forecasting, and avoiding unnecessary expenditures on hardware and software.

“Many internal cloud platforms focus on automating the process of provisioning capacity in a specific target environment, but this is actually a small part of the overall picture,” said Hillier.  “It still forces organizations to figure out which environment, geography and hosting technology is best for an application or request. This is a time consuming, inaccurate and highly manual process, and the Reservation Console solves this by automating the process of evaluating hosting options, routing capacity requests and reserving capacity in the target environment."

It’s another step towards improving data center efficiency, eliminating what is typically a manually intensive process for those with several environments trying to gauge what should go where.

At the beginning of the year, CiRBA added a license control system to help reel in "Licensing Sprawl." Now with the reservation console, it’s enabling organizations to automate new workload routing and capacity processes. The reservation console features a scoring system that uses several variables to identify the optimal destination environment for new workloads. There’s a ‘Hosting Score’, which is based on criteria such as occupancy levels, technical considerations, software licensing constraints (this ties in to the aforementioned license control system), operational policies and compliance. Organizations can fine tune the weighting to suit their needs.

The reservation console leverages CiRBA’s workload routing API which was released in June, that enables placement recommendations to be fed directly from CiRBA through to cloud management platforms such as OpenStack.