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Is there something new under the sun? CiRBA launches 7.1

CiRBA 7.1 offers some interesting features. Is the company offering something really new and different?
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

I read through the announcement materials offered by CiRBA in which the company described CiRBA 7.1. The company claims that  CiRBA  7.1 is the only capacity management solution that offers multi-hypervisor support for VMware, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and PowerVM on AIX.

The company also discussed a capacity reservation system that can segment computing environments by category so that each category can be given needed resources without either wasting precious resources through over provisioning or starving critical tasks by not giving them enough resources to work efficiently.

Snapshot analysis

The management software market is crowded with a few very larger players, such as IBM, HP, CA or BMC, and a whole host of smaller players.  I hear from at least one of the every day or so. After some analysis, the old saw that there is nothing new under the sun appears to continue to be proven out daily.

Since management of systems, storage, networks, databases, applications and other components of an IT environment has been a requirement for a long time, it is rather difficult for suppliers to come up with something totally new, something that doesn't exist in one form or another within the product capabilities of major players in the market.

The biggest players, such as IBM, HP, or CA, look for new ways to integrate the capabilities they offer or to manage some new device or service.

The smaller suppliers hope that their products will come to market quicker, be a bit easier to use for some functions or support some new device that isn't yet supported by the bigger players. These smaller players seek out a new way to display operational information and make it more easily accessible to busy IT and Network administrative staff. They may also offer some new way to monitor operational data, analyze that data, and come up with new insights not available from other players.

When I reviewed what  CiRBA  had to say about the new version of its product, I thought that the combination of computing environments  CiRBA  7.1 can manage was interesting, but those environments can be readily managed in other ways. The approach to displaying operational information appeared to be quite useful, but once again other suppliers are offering similar capabilities. The capacity management solution appears to offer capabilities somewhat similar to IBM's Platform Computing Symphony.

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