Novell announced the latest release of its data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool. The product, PlateSpin Recon 3.7, combines consolidation planning with capacity management to give customers an ongoing view of their physical and virtual infrastructure. With this latest version, Novell says it 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. This is intended to help take 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 a more 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, Novell says. Customers can use this information to reclaim unused storage, thereby postponing additional capital expense, and to better 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," Mike Robinson, product marketing manager at Novell, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "In addition to monitoring how the CPU processing power, memory, and disk I/O throughput are being used, we now monitor storage consumption as well. 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 have positioned PlateSpin Recon as the one product customers can deploy in their data center and get a holistic view," claims Robinson. "We continually try to expand the number of platforms that can be monitored and can be inventoried by PlateSpin Recon so that people don't have to deploy multiple tools to keep doing the same thing-so they don't have to deploy one tool for either VMware infrastructure, and a different tool for Hyper-V infrastructure and a different tool for Solaris, and something else for AIX. Now PlateSpin Recon can do all of those in the same tool."
PlateSpin Recon 3.7, available now, is a component of PlateSpin Virtualization and Workload Management solutions from Novell. For more information, go here.