PlateSpin Products

Virtual Capacity Management and Consolidation Planning

Successful virtualization initiatives require considerable up-front planning to ensure maximum ROI. But it doesn’t end there. Because resource utilization changes over time, regular reassessment and management are required to maintain optimal efficiency. PlateSpin® Recon from Novell® is a sophisticated workload analysis, planning and management solution that provides new levels of intelligence, visual analysis and forecasting for optimizing the data center.

Improve Consolidation Ratios with Comprehensive Workload Profiling
Previously, data center managers had to rely on best guesses to identify underutilized physical servers and virtual hosts, and to allocate sufficient resources for current and future needs. The unique workload profiling in PlateSpin Recon tracks actual CPU, disk, memory and network utilization over time, on both physical and virtual hosts. Every server workload and virtual host has utilization peaks and valleys, and PlateSpin Recon can build consolidation scenarios based on interlocking these peaks and valleys. This capability minimizes resource contention and ensures higher consolidation ratios compared to other approaches that use only a single snapshot or record only peak usage. And higher consolidation ratios mean better use and longer life for your current hardware, and fewer new servers that you need to buy in the future.

Extend the Capacity of Your Virtual Infrastructure
Without effective management, virtual machines can rapidly proliferate, leading to poor resource utilization and an unwieldy infrastructure. The virtual capacity management capabilities in PlateSpin Recon find unused resources in virtualized IT environments, even when the virtualization platform shows 100 percent allocation. By reporting on the actual available resources, PlateSpin Recon from Novell enables allocated resources to be reclaimed and reassigned—to new virtual machines, or to other virtual machines that require more resources—deferring the need to purchase new hardware and maximizing the usable life of the current hardware.

Increase Visibility across Multiplatform Environments
With broad support for Windows*, Linux* and UNIX* platforms and scalability to accommodate even the world’s largest data centers, PlateSpin Recon provides a true enterprise-scale workload analysis, planning and management solution. Data can be aggregated from multiple PlateSpin Recon data collectors for centralized data warehousing, analysis and planning to accommodate larger enterprises. When combined with PlateSpin Migrate, the Novell multiplatform workload migration solution, organizations gain a complete end-to-end solution with tightly integrated planning and execution for data center initiatives.

PlateSpin products allow organizations to adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the data center. With support for physical and virtual machines, as well as images, our products improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, hardware migration and disaster recovery initiatives.
Products PlateSpin Recon Overview Uses of PlateSpin Recon Features System Requirements Virtual Infrastructure Management Green Calculator PlateSpin Migrate PlateSpin Orchestrate PlateSpin Protect PlateSpin Forge	PlateSpin Recon Virtual Capacity Management and Consolidation Planning Successful virtualization initiatives require considerable up-front planning to ensure maximum ROI. But it doesn’t end there. Because resource utilization changes over time, regular reassessment and management are required to maintain optimal efficiency. PlateSpin® Recon from Novell® is a sophisticated workload analysis, planning and management solution that provides new levels of intelligence, visual analysis and forecasting for optimizing the data center. 3 reasons to Purchase PlateSpin Recon Improve Consolidation Ratios with Comprehensive Workload Profiling Previously, data center managers had to rely on best guesses to identify underutilized physical servers and virtual hosts, and to allocate sufficient resources for current and future needs. The unique workload profiling in PlateSpin Recon tracks actual CPU, disk, memory and network utilization over time, on both physical and virtual hosts. Every server workload and virtual host has utilization peaks and valleys, and PlateSpin Recon can build consolidation scenarios based on interlocking these peaks and valleys. This capability minimizes resource contention and ensures higher consolidation ratios compared to other approaches that use only a single snapshot or record only peak usage. And higher consolidation ratios mean better use and longer life for your current hardware, and fewer new servers that you need to buy in the future. Extend the Capacity of Your Virtual Infrastructure Without effective management, virtual machines can rapidly proliferate, leading to poor resource utilization and an unwieldy infrastructure. The virtual capacity management capabilities in PlateSpin Recon find unused resources in virtualized IT environments, even when the virtualization platform shows 100 percent allocation. By reporting on the actual available resources, PlateSpin Recon from Novell enables allocated resources to be reclaimed and reassigned—to new virtual machines, or to other virtual machines that require more resources—deferring the need to purchase new hardware and maximizing the usable life of the current hardware. Increase Visibility across Multiplatform Environments With broad support for Windows, Linux and UNIX* platforms and scalability to accommodate even the world’s largest data centers, PlateSpin Recon provides a true enterprise-scale workload analysis, planning and management solution. Data can be aggregated from multiple PlateSpin Recon data collectors for centralized data warehousing, analysis and planning to accommodate larger enterprises. When combined with PlateSpin Migrate, the Novell multiplatform workload migration solution, organizations gain a complete end-to-end solution with tightly integrated planning and execution for data center initiatives.