PlateSpin has announced the general availability release of its Consolidation Planning Module for PlateSpin PowerRecon. The module is a completely automated analysis engine which determines optimal fit between application workloads and server resources. It takes hardware, software, and performance information gathered by PlateSpin's PowerRecon package, and then automatically provides a recommendation for the optimal allocation of servers to the most appropriate virtual hosts, whether that is VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, or Microsoft Virtual Server. It uniquely uses CPU, disk, network, memory and time to determine the proper distribution of servers to a set of virtual hosts. By using the PlateSpin suite of products, data center managers can accelerate their server consolidation projects by quickly and easily determining where to consolidate servers to minimize hardware, while maximizing application performance.

PlateSpin's press release goes on to say:

"Deciding on how to consolidate servers without proper analysis, optimization and what-if modeling tools is far from easy," said John Stetic, PlateSpin Director of Product Management. "By using PowerRecon with the Consolidation Planning Module and PowerConvert, our customers can significantly accelerate their time to value and maximize their return on investment with virtualization."

The Consolidation Planning Module expands the capabilities of PlateSpin PowerRecon with the following features:

• Automatically analyzes the five critical dimensions of workload: CPU, Disk, Memory, Network and Time across hundreds of servers simultaneously


• Target server templates allow users to input virtual host server characteristics of their preferred makes and models prior to purchasing them


• Modeling of virtual host utilization and allocation of VMs to those hosts


• Time-based analysis to stagger multiple workloads evenly across virtual hosts


• Automatically determines number of host servers required as target for a given set of physical servers to consolidate


• Analysis support for both Windows and Linux servers

The Consolidation Planning Module is the first in a series of licensable modules that will be offered with PlateSpin PowerRecon to optimize the use of servers in the data center. This first module will enable data centers to perform continuous server consolidation by allowing data center managers to quickly and easily assess their optimization levels at any time. When combined with PlateSpin PowerConvert to automate migrating server workloads to the destinations recommended by PowerRecon, the combined product suite provides the industry's most automated end-to-end software solution for continuously optimizing the data center.

Posted by David Marshall on May 23, 2006 01:28 PM