INDUSTRY

Neptuny today launches Caplan 3.0, the business-aware Capacity Management solution for large data centres and networks. The new version of Caplan facilitates successful implementation of virtualization and consolidation initiatives as well as the production of future scenarios to enable the alignment between IT resources and business initiatives. Rationalizing IT resources while still being able to support the business is imperative for all corporations. Also, with a slumping economy it becomes even more important to optimize the use of resources and to reduce operating and capital costs. The new version of Caplan 3.0 reduces overcapacity by its ability to determine the amount of capacity required at any given time leading to a more cost effective and greener IT department. Caplan 3.0 can also predict capacity shortages, thereby reducing the likelihood of any performance or capacity-related incidents as well as ensuring that the minimum capacity required to keep the business running is available in the event of any IT failure. Neptuny’s CEO Fabio Violante comments: “By using Caplan 3.0 enterprises are able to uniquely analyse business data and system data to forecast capacity requirements in near real time. IT managers are not only able to plan capacity but are also alerted by Caplan before additional resources need to be implemented and, more important, Caplan can identify underutilized capacity and determine areas for consolidation. A unique feature in Caplan is the ability to forecast what resources will be needed and if the IT infrastructure can cope when or if new services or business functions are implemented”. By doing ‘what-if’ analysis Caplan can reduce the time and increase the accuracy of analysing the impact of infrastructure change. This analysis allows a quick comparison of different scenarios and hence a reduction of unforeseen critical situations, such as service disruptions, not meeting SLAs or even application crashes. Caplan enables the IT manager to identify critical situations that may occur if changes are made to the infrastructure and reallocate underutilised resources. This way, Caplan facilitates communication between the IT department and the rest of the business through the ability to objectively justify investments based on business objectives. Caplan 3.0 can be leveraged for virtualized environments as well. The latest release of Caplan v3.0 now supports several virtualization technologies including VMware ESX Server, AIX Micro partitions, HP nPartition/vPartition, Solaris Dynamic System Domains, and MS Virtual Server 2005. For all these technologies, Caplan has the ability to identify systems to be consolidated and to safely perform consolidation and virtualization initiatives as it can simulate both physical consolidation and virtualization. Once initiatives have been undertaken Caplan will automatically monitor the infrastructure behaviour to notify whether its behaviour does not differ from detected baseline. Therefore, Caplan can help customers to reduce risks involved in overloading the virtualized infrastructure in their data centres. Additionally, Caplan 3.0 provides specific features enabling Capacity Management to be easily integrated with ITSM tools and workflow platforms, thus allowing external third-party application to leverage Caplan services (via SOAP Web Services and HTTP/XML calls) and to asynchronously push data into Caplan Capacity Database (via J2EE JMS Messages). This allows Caplan to promote an improved IT culture through the introduction of a structured capacity management process that complies with ITIL v3 best practices regarding Capacity Management.