CiRBA and right analytics
CiRBA, a provider of capacity transformation and control software, reached out to me to introduce me to their Software License Control System. Their gold is to help organizations reduce their software licensing costs by using better intelligence when consolidating virtual workloads on physical systems. CiRBA's Software License Control module is an add-on to the company's Capacity Control Console that is designed to optimize placement of virtual machine in both virtual and cloud environments to reduce software licensing costs.
Here's how CiRBA describes the Software License Control Module
CiRBA offers a Software License Control module as an add-on to our award-winning Capacity Control Console that optimizes VM placements in virtual and cloud infrastructure in order to:
- Reduce the number of processors/hosts requiring licenses. CiRBA determines optimized VM placements to both maximize the density of licensed components on physical hosts and isolate these licensed VMs from those not requiring the licenses.
- Contain the licensed VMs on the licensed physical servers. CiRBA’s analytics restrict placements of licensed VMs to the designated physical servers over time in order to ensure licensing compliance and continued efficiency.
Snapshot Analysis
Most analysts cite the steps to data center transformation as standardize, consolidate, virtualize, automate and then orchestrate. CiRBA would point out that although many companies have gotten to the virtualize step, they haven't really used best practices in the consolidation step. They are still deploying workloads on too many servers and could use some help with load and configuration management.
CiRBA would point out that that the proper use of analysis to optimally place VMs on hosts can not only improve overall virtual environment performance but can also reduce software licensing costs when software is licensed per host rather than using other common licensing schemes.
While I'm a proponent of paying suppliers for the value they bring to the data center, I also believe that it isn't necessary to pay more than their rules require. CiRBA appears to offer an important capability to take advantage of host-based licensing and reduce software licensing costs.