CiRBA, Inc., provider of data center intelligence solutions, recently announced that the company has seen tremendous growth throughout 2007, noting that the virtualization and consolidation planning software markets have finally emerged. Consumers are becoming well aware of the problems with server sprawl, space constraints and power consumption in their data centers, forcing them to take a more holistic and cri CiRBA, Inc., provider of data center intelligence solutions, recently announced that the company has seen tremendous growth throughout 2007, noting that the virtualization and consolidation planning software markets have finally emerged. Consumers are becoming well aware of the problems with server sprawl, space constraints and power consumption in their data centers, forcing them to take a more holistic and critical view of their environments.“Virtualization and consolidation rank high as strategic priorities, as IT executives seek to reduce physical server counts and complexity within IT infrastructures,” said Gerry Smith, president and CEO of CiRBA. “Our remarkable growth over the past year shows that organizations around the world are choosing CiRBA as their technology of choice for dealing with their number one challenge in transforming their environments – planning.”To continue this momentum, CiRBA just launched version 4.5 of its Data Center Intelligence software as well as a new “one-click analysis template technology”. Some of the turnkey features incorporated into the 4.5 release include things such as the addition of unicode technology, allowing CiRBA’s product to be used in any language, even Japanese and Chinese, for global presence.They also added “Proactive Resource Placement” which allows for virtual environments to be set up moving forward by examining the history at a specific date and time to predict workflow at that time and better manage resources.“Currently data center managers or management software use short-term utilization trends to make decisions on where to place resources,” said Andrew Hillier, CiRBA Co-Founder and CTO. “Proactive Resource Placement enables organizations to leverage historical data to prepare for changes in workloads in advance. This enables optimal decisions about where to place important resources to maximize utilization and performance throughout the data center.” The company also added something called “One-click Analysis Templates”, which allows users to quickly analyze existing server environments to determine which virtualization technologies best suit their unique needs. The initial release of this functionality includes templates for VMware with motioning, VMware without motioning, XenSource (with and without XenMotion), Oracle VM and Sun’s xVM.“There are new virtualization technologies entering the market on a weekly basis, and given the relative strengths and weaknesses of each solution there is not one ‘best’ virtualization solution,” said Hillier. “This is comparable to the fact that there has never been one ‘best’ hardware platform to use across a data center. Every IT environment has technical and non-technical attributes that make it better suited to a particular virtualization strategy, and the challenge is to find that strategy.” Software Development