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Toronto-based Cirba Inc., which specializes in software-defined infrastructure control software, on Nov. 18 released a new integration to EMC’s ViPR SRM (storage resource manager), which enables enterprises to optimize use of storage resources through smarter workload placements and visibility into storage system health.
Cirba provides analytics for storage supply and demand in the physical and virtual IT worlds. Storage inefficiencies have long been among the biggest causes of data movement problems in systems.
The new connection to EMC adds to Cirba’s existing support for storage resources managed by NetApp OnCommand Insight (OCI), which was announced in August.
With this new release, Cirba’s analytics enable organizations to make better use of storage resources monitored by EMC SRM by determining the optimal host environment for the workload based on multiple factors. These include detailed storage requirements, workload utilization, business, technical, and software licensing.
Cirba uses VM placements to ensure the right match between workload requirements and available storage capacity and tiers. It also keeps the use of these resources balanced with the use of compute resources across the enterprise to free up stranded capacity, CTO and co-founder Andrew Hillier told eWEEK.
“In the IT stack, we receive the demand requests and route them to the right infrastructure,” Hillier said. “We tend to play at the cloud stack level by making clouds smarter, to run more efficiently. In doing so, we optimize the footprint in various ways.”
Cirba provides virtual and cloud infrastructure management teams with visibility into when resource shortfalls might adversely affect associated VMs and where excess resources exist in the storage resources attached to EMC SRM.
With Cirba, the data available in EMC ViPR SRM can now be analyzed to drive strategic hosting decisions, enabling policy-driven workload routing, future capacity reservation, and detailed placement of virtual machines based on their precise compute and storage requirements, the company said.
“Because SRM supports multi-vendor storage environments, this enables enterprisewide optimization and balancing of the use of storage resources, predictive analysis of potential shortfalls, and comprehensive visibility back to the lines of business,” Hillier said.
Cirba for EMC ViPR SRM is available now. Go here for more information.