Cirba updates data center software

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April 10, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Cirba Inc. announced Version 3.0 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software today and identified Bell Mobility in Montreal as a recent customer.

Cirba competes in a crowded field of management software vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Tivoli, CA Inc. and BMC Software Inc., according to analysts.

Toronto-based Cirba is a relative start-up and has only six customers. But most of those customers are large operations -- including Bell Canada's Bell Mobility unit, which has been testing the Cirba software for three weeks to begin a long-term server consolidation project, said Michael Tromblay, manager of OSS engineering at the cellular phone service provider.

One of the central purposes of Cirba’s DCI is to effectively allocate IT resources, including servers, other hardware and software, said Cirba CEO Gerry Smith.

The new version includes changes to the software architecture to support larger data centers and new ways of presenting reports on system functions and components.

Tromblay said Bell Mobility found it could reduce 10% of its server hardware, with a corresponding reduction of maintenance and support costs. The software was put in production with 110 servers, and could ultimately be expanded to 400, he said.

“Our goal [with consolidation] is over 20%,” Tromblay said, noting that server vendors “don’t have in mind the reduction of servers.”

Bell Mobility runs many different versions of Sun Solaris servers, he said, and part of the purpose of the software is to analyze whether a server can take on more data and “not kill it.”

Bell Mobility has been using Cirba software for two years and has run an earlier version of DCI. Tromblay said he compared Cirba software from other large management vendors, which he would not name, and found Cirba’s functionality to be better. “We didn’t believe we could do that much [consolidation],” he said.

Bell Mobility is conducting a study on ROI with the new Cirba software, but Tromblay said he had no details about cost or savings.

Andi Mann, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo., said large management vendors have tools similar to Cirba. But Cirba has a slight advantage with its ability to present “specific and actionable data about the ability to consolidate servers.”

While some customers might shy away from a smaller company such as Cirba, Mann said it's possible to deploy software from a smaller vendor and see good results quickly -- even if the vendor is purchased or goes out of business.

“Most companies are looking for a short-term payback anyway, so the size of the vendor doesn’t matter,” Mann said.

Smith said Cirba prides itself on how its software is designed not to automatically alter a data center operation; it instead forwards detailed reports on the status of critical systems.

But Mann said he would like to see Cirba do more in terms of automation.

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