PlateSpin Recon

Data Center Planning, Analysis and Ongoing Management

To succeed with your data center initiatives, you need to analyze and carefully create a plan. PlateSpin Recon makes those tasks easier and more efficient with a complete range of workload profiling, analysis and planning capabilities that take the guesswork out of complex server consolidation, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and green data center initiatives.

PlateSpin Recon features:

Remote Data Collection

Collect inventory and performance data remotely from your data center servers. The PlateSpin Recon run-once inventory collector gathers complete server inventory data and uses standard OS capabilities to gather performance data. You can also import utilization data directly from your existing monitoring tools.

Rich Data Modeling

Choose how to best consolidate your servers by using the sophisticated analysis of resources, workloads and utilization trends from PlateSpin Recon. Because it is tightly integrated with VMware VirtualCenter, you can see better into your virtual infrastructure and improve the way you manage your data center.

Custom Report Creation and Delivery

Define resource and workload parameters and generate custom visual reports to help you assess your data center and server consolidations. With these reports, you can quickly identify consolidation candidates based on resource utilization trends. You can also compare workload characteristics before and after consolidation. PlateSpin Recon lets you schedule and deliver reports via email or FTP. That way, you always have easy access to the most up-to-date information no matter where you are.

Flexible Data Capture and Export

Easily export PlateSpin Recon data to a number of standard formats including HTML, PDF, Word, CSV, Excel or images to create the reports that you need. Extract raw data directly from PlateSpin Recon and deliver it to your business applications for advanced statistical analysis.

Enterprise-Level Scalability

Take advantage of robust data collection, analysis and planning for all servers in the network. Its multi-platform capabilities put PlateSpin Recon in a class of its own for large-scale data center consolidation initiatives. With PlateSpin Recon, you can also aggregate data from multiple data collectors for centralized data warehousing, analysis and planning.

VM Growth Reporting

Run virtual machine growth reports to monitor and and help you better deal with virtual machine sprawl.

Multiple Data Center Support

Distribute PlateSpin Recon to different geographical locations for remote data collection (and schedule updates to a master PlateSpin Recon installation). Once it is installed in remote locations, you can perform centralized analysis and planning for initiatives like server or data center consolidation.

Flexible Chargeback Reporting

Effectively allocate and share virtual resources across business units and departmental owners. With its flexible chargeback reporting capabilities, PlateSpin Recon lets you improve your financial accounting by accurately calculating IT costs based on actual resource usage.

Planning

Automatically generate server consolidation and disaster recovery plans based on detailed workload analysis from PlateSpin Recon. You can ensure the best fit between your server workloads and virtual resources. Since PlateSpin Recon can help you forecast data, you can be sure that your plans are built to accommodate future growth.

Workload Analysis

Automatically analyze the five critical dimensions of workload—CPU, disk, memory, network and time—across thousands of servers simultaneously, providing consolidation plans that maximize utilization while minimizing competition for resources.

Scenario Modeling

Create and compare custom scenarios with user-defined target server specifications. Use templates like those pre-populated for new servers or existing virtual machine servers to create an optimal consolidation plan.

Power and Cooling Analysis

Compare and contrast potential power and cooling cost savings and ROI using different consolidation scenarios. You can set values using custom fields in a central database to define power and cooling requirements for major hardware platforms. You can then easily analyze and justify the cost of green computing initiatives.

Time-Based Analysis

Stagger multiple workloads evenly across virtual hosts and account for hourly peaks and valleys in your server usage.

Workload and Utilization Forecasting

Use historical trends to help predict future workload and resource utilization. Forecasting helps you better plan for server consolidation and infrastructure growth and become more pro-active when managing your system. PlateSpin Recon presents forecasting data on CPU, disk, memory and usage trends in easy-to-read charts, reports and plans.