Andrew Hillier, Co-founder & CTO “A game of Tetris.” No one else can demystify the underlying complexity of ‘cloud capacity’ the way Cirba’s Co-founder and CTO, Andrew Hillier does. Analogous to the tile-matching puzzle, he says, “We can deterministically combine and dovetail intraday application workload utilization patterns to safely reduce the capacity required to serve application workloads.” Considering the prevailing software-defined era, he also stresses on the fact that there is a dearth of solutions that truly understand the deep application workload requirements alongside the detailed capabilities of all available infrastructures—on-premise and public cloud. “Only Cirba’s analytics engine can automatically determine the optimal hosting environment, workload placement, and resource allocation to ensure the resulting hybrid cloud infrastructure stays cost-effective, low risk, and compliant,” states Hillier.
Today, IT organizations are grappling with a new challenge of determining hosting venues for new workloads across internal and external infrastructure, and a variety of hosting models. Despite the availability of a plethora of options for determining which internal environment is suitable, none of the approaches can ensure that workloads get access to the required resources or the placements comply with policies. There is simply a lack of means to optimize capacity decisions in hybrid cloud environments. Beating others to the draw, Cirba realized this market gap and laid the cornerstone of Densify.com—its SaaS product that makes it incredibly easy for organizations to get visibility into hybrid capacity requirements and optimize their use for driving significant cost savings and reducing risk, meanwhile also ensuring performance, security, and compliance.
Despite the technological headway like soaring adoption of hybrid cloud, the methodology to deterministically know where to best host application workloads and capacity requirements resides in the Stone Age. The discipline of cloud capacity planning continues to rely on the spreadsheets and manual efforts to predict the “footprint” of applications and the resource assignment. “This calls for advanced analytics that can assess the workload requirements on a real-time basis and determine the best-possible hosting venue and the optimal mix of infrastructure resources,” says Hillier. This is precisely what Cirba assists the enterprises with. “We provide best-in-breed predictive analytics for optimizing capacity decisions in hybrid cloud environments,” he adds.
Whilst the realm of hybrid capacity analytics is tied in knots, Densify.com, built on Cirba’s analytics engine, allows enterprises to extricate themselves from manual processes with automated control over infrastructure resources for embracing the ‘cloud nine’ of operational efficiency and safety.
Cirba provides best in breed predictive analytics for optimizing capacity decisions in hybrid cloud environments
The process takes off with the firm’s infrastructure control analytics accurately assessing all utilization, technical, and business requirements followed by intelligently matching them with the capability of available infrastructure. Regardless of whether the workloads are located in a data center, bare metal infrastructure, or a public cloud offering, Densify.com enables real-time, automated selection of the best execution venue for workloads by examining the workload patterns for each application, evaluating the suitability of target environments based on relative cost, occupancy levels, and fit-for-purpose criteria such as operating system, software licensing requirements, storage requirements, and operating policies.
The scintillating aspect of Cirba’s SaaS product lies in its ability to automate infrastructure optimization that increases VM density and reduces resource contention in on-premise infrastructure and public cloud spending. Reinforcing the distinctive attributes of Densify.com, Hillier states, “Our software results in significantly higher VM density—hardware savings of 33 percent and software savings of 55 percent on average—and reduced resource contention and performance risk.”
Needless to say, Cirba has fostered partnerships with renowned names in the industry like IBM, Wipro, HPE, HCL, Dell, and Cisco to assist leading Fortune 1000 organizations including Bank of America, Citi and FedEx. Throwing more light into the functionalities of Densify.com, Hillier recalls working in close partnership with a global provider of banking and payment technologies who was grappling with capacity risk in virtualized infrastructure and lack of transparency into a VM’s true resource requirements. Besides delivering the benefits of cost avoidance, improved instance to asset ratio, reduction in cabling, power, and cooling costs, Densify.com also enabled policy change to ‘densify’ the client’s environment and improve efficiency without introducing operational risk.
Given the aspect of hybrid capacity planning is a long-standing conundrum, Cirba’s unique solution digs deeper into intraday application workload patterns, personalities, technical, and policy requirements to optimally size and place workloads in order to densify infrastructure. While staying ahead of the curve and anticipating future developments require going beyond customer advisor groups, “Cirba has a defined, systematic research approach that successfully keeps us on top of advancing technology,” extols Hillier. “It’s time for organizations to evolve. Currently many operate with their cloud and on-premise infrastructure teams in silos and therefore are not taking a ‘bigger picture’ view of the fact that no matter where their infrastructure is hosted, it’s all about the capacity.” At this juncture, where hybrid capacity planning is gaining mainstream attraction, Cirba as an early bird in the landscape has gained a head-start to stay a mile ahead of competitors.
