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Cirba Issues Statement: Control Analytics Essential to Adopting Software-Defined Networking
[August 19, 2015]

Cirba Issues Statement: Control Analytics Essential to Adopting Software-Defined Networking


Cirba Inc., the leading provider of software-defined infrastructure control software, today issued the following statement regarding the importance of adopting an analytics-based approach for controlling VM placements in software-defined networking (SDN) environments:

Cirba is currently seeing strong momentum of SDN adoption, which is seen as an important step in achieving the software-defined data center. This is consistent with broader industry observations, and Infonetics Research, now part of IHS (News - Alert) Inc., found that 79 percent of medium and large businesses in North America are planning to have SDN in live production in the data center by the end of 2017.

Most organizations are interested in SDN for the increased agility, provisioning speed and security it delivers. At the same time, however, it also puts greater pressure on the decision of where to place VMs within an environment. SDN abstracts the physical network layer and allows groups of VMs to be configured to "think" they are on the same network segment, even if they are not. This means that a VM is no longer physically limited to residing on servers that are connected to a particular physical network, and can reside on any server within a broader mobility domain. This creates far more options as to which serers can host a particular workload, and this new found freedom presents both opportunities and challenges in VM placement.



On one hand, SDN creates an increased potential for VM placements to violate business policies, compliance rules, even software licensing boundaries. For example, if a VM running a database server is unconstrained in where it is placed, most vendor licensing agreements will dictate that the full set of hosts must be licensed to run it. This necessitates a more rigorous approach to VM hosting and placement decisions that considers all the utilization requirements, alongside policies, technical requirements, software licensing considerations, etc., to determine VM placements. Cirba's analytics optimizes VM placements by modeling all of the requirements and constraints affecting a set of workloads, and uses these to determine optimal VM placements and resource allocations. In SDN infrastructure, this automated, policy-driven placement is critical to dealing with the complexity and lack of control that can arise.

In addition to avoiding risk, this intelligent VM placement will also dovetail workloads in a way that is analogous to the game of Tetris®, and will safely densify infrastructure by an average of 48 percent in virtual and cloud hosting environments. Where SDN is present, Cirba enables organizations to optimize "beyond the cluster" by optimally placing VMs on an enterprise-wide scale, effectively playing a "bigger game of Tetris" and making optimal use of the whole portfolio of infrastructure assets. This is very important to the adoption of SDN, as the ability to drive hard-dollar hardware and software savings creates a strong business case for SDN adoption.


SDN technologies signify an important shift in the way networks are configured and used, but without the ability to codify in software all of the factors impacting VM placements in these advanced hosting environments, organizations cannot hope to achieve their goals of automation, agility, efficiency and compliance.

Cirba is currently working with customers to enable deployments of SDN technologies such as VMware® NSX® and Cisco (News - Alert)® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in conjunction with its software-defined infrastructure control analytics.

About Cirba Inc.
Cirba has re-imagined infrastructure control for the software-defined era.

We're enabling the world's most successful organizations to scientifically balance infrastructure supply and application demand-creating a demand-driven approach to infrastructure management that maximizes efficiency and cost-savings while reducing risk.

For more information, visit www.cirba.com or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @Cirba.


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