Welcoming CiRBA CTO Andrew Hillier to the TMC (News - Alert) newsroom at the recent Cloud Expo 2011 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani asked Hillier what his company does. Hillier told Tehrani that CiRBA is an analytics software company that determines the optimal workload placements and resource allocations required to safely maximize the efficiency of cloud, virtual, and physical infrastructure.

Continuing the discussion, Tehrani was curious to understand the benefits of using the CiRBA analytics software. Hillier replied, “What it does after crunching the data is that it gives you the maximum possible efficiency with minimum possible risk.”

He added, “Cloud is all about policies. So when you go to cloud, policies decide where you should put things and where you should not. We model all those policies. So when you use our product to plan a cloud, for example, you get the best possible efficiency.”

Although, an enterprise is a typical customer of our products, there is a wide range of customers who can benefit from these services, noted Hillier. He said that large enterprises have a high need for this kind of software because of the complexity of the environment.  

Furthermore, CiRBA’s technology officer talked about the packaged analytics software’s ability to streamline and improve decision-making processes for cloud migration. “Policies that we model can express both qualitative and quantitative elements,” stated Hillier.

In terms of the evolution of the market, CiRBA executive said that the industry has gone through a big burst of virtualization, which is now a legacy environment. Cloud is the new focus “In fact, cloud is the new environment,” Hillier said. And Tehrani wanted to know what are some of the new challenges confronting the cloud environment.

“Once you have the cloud running, getting all the existing legacy workloads into it is a far bigger challenge,” according to Hillier.

Managing the capacity of that cloud is also a big challenge, asserted Hillier. Other challenges highlighted by the CiRBA executive included correct allocations, ensuring everything is in the right place and balancing it over time.

“These are complex challenges that you must take care of otherwise you won’t run efficiently,” explained Hillier.

In conclusion, Hillier said that CiRBA’s new Efficiency and Risk Spectrum (News - Alert) provides an intuitive visualization of all the components in a virtual environment, making situations like these easy to spot.