PlateSpin Recon 3.7, the latest release of Novell's data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool, is now available. The product combines consolidation planning with capacity management to give customers an ongoing view of their physical and virtual infrastructure. With this latest version, Novell has expanded PlateSpin Recon's resource analysis to include granular detail on current, historical, and expected future consumption of local and remote storage resources.
PlateSpin Recon collects workload inventory and utilization statistics to provide a picture of hardware and application services running in the data center, including how and when their resources are being used, taking the guesswork out of complex server consolidation and capacity planning initiatives and providing ongoing management of the resources and costs of an organization's physical and virtual infrastructure.
By tracking detailed metrics on storage usage over time, versus a simple point-in-time snapshot, PlateSpin Recon provides an accurate picture of how and when local and remote (iSCSI and FC SAN) storage resources (at both the physical disk and logical volume level) are being consumed by physical servers, as well as by virtual machines and host servers. Customers can use this information to reclaim unused storage, thereby postponing additional capital expense, and to accurately predict future requirements.
"Up until version 3.6, we would tell you what storage was available. In version 3.7, we have introduced the capability now of being able to monitor how storage is being used," explains Mike Robinson, product marketing manager at Novell. "In addition to monitoring how the CPU processing power is being used, how memory is being used, how network and disk I/O throughput is being used, now we actually monitor storage consumption as well, and that lets our customers recognize when they might have to add new storage resources, and when they may have to move virtual machines or physical machines around to take advantage of excess storage resources on one server or in one area that might be best served by moving different workloads there."
PlateSpin Recon 3.7 also includes expanded Unix platform support, adding AIX workloads to its existing support for Solaris workloads. With support for Windows, Linux, Unix and Solaris platforms, PlateSpin Recon 3.7 monitors, manages and reports on physical and virtual workloads and resources from a range of virtualization platforms, operating systems and hardware. "We continually try to expand the number of platforms that can be monitored and can be inventoried by PlateSpin Recon," says Robinson.
PlateSpin Recon 3.7 is a component of PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management solutions from Novell. For more information, go here.