News
Caplan™ v3.2 : IT Cost Visibility, Containment and Planning
December 2009 by Marc Jacob
Neptuny launches Caplan™ 3.2, the recognized solution that makes “Capacity Planning easy” for large data centres and networks. The new version of Caplan will help solve the thorny problem facing organisations that need to allocate IT costs to departments or divisions based on utilization or allocation of IT resources based on what they have used.. Caplan 3.2 will provide effective support to the IT department to enable them to get better visibility of the costs of their IT infrastructures which is key in the economic climate today when budgets have been tightened. Caplan 3.2 also provides support for consolidation and virtualization as well as enhanced features to generate future scenarios to enable the alignment between IT resources and business initiatives.
Caplan 3.2 new features include:
· Accounting and Chargeback
· Consolidation Solution
· Integrated Development Environment
· Remote ETL Engine
· Integration of different data sources
Accounting and Chargeback
Caplan™ 3.2 introduces a brand new feature, called Accounting & Chargeback Solution that leverages resource utilization data that is stored in Caplan™ to support users to evaluate the cost of IT services and to charge them back to the final users. Caplan™ supports several types of cost models (e.g. fixed-, allocation-, utilization-based) that can be easily composed to create complex cost models (e.g. hybrid models, partially based on allocated and used resources). Caplan™ interface allows users to easily create (multiple) target hierarchies and to assign resources to targets (hierarchies). Caplan™ provides several accounting and chargeback reports templates, that can automatically generated and published, and specific dashboard views to support on-line cost analyses.
Caplan™ 3.2 provides an improved module, called Consolidation Solution, supporting Capacity Planning for infrastructures based on different virtualization layers (e.g. VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen, AIX LPARs, Solaris Containers and Logical Domains), and providing Optimal Allocation Models to automatically simulate placement scenarios of both virtual and physical machines on virtualized infrastructures with respect to (custom) business or technical constraints;
Integrated Development Environment
Caplan™ 3.2 now provides a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on Eclipse, called Caplan Integration Studio (CIS), which helps users to create custom connectors. Caplan™ CIS provides all the required facilities to develop (e.g. auto-completion, code inspection, code highlighting), test (e.g. test run, debug) and to publish (from the CIS interface) new connectors in production;
Remote ETL Engine,
Caplan can import and store high volumes of (performance and configuration) data; some Neptuny customers store terabytes of data at different time granularities. Now, Caplan™ introduces a new architectural component, called Remote ETL Engine, that further enhances Caplan™ integration capabilities for very large environments, by allowing Caplan™ to centralize data related to several geographically distributed locations (e.g. different Data Centers), possibly connected by slow connections (e.g. WAN). One or more Remote ETL Engines are installed in these distributed locations to allow Caplan™ to automatically gather high volumes of data, possibly buffer them locally to upload them in the central Caplan™ Data Warehouse when an efficient communication can be established without impacting normal business operations;
Integration of different data sources
Caplan™ (agent-less) architecture is also well known for its ability to integrate different data sources (see for example http://tinyurl.com/ylojwml). This ability relies on the out-of-the-box connectors and mechanisms provided by Caplan™ to create custom connectors. Typically, each new Caplan™ version introduces new or improved connectors to import performance (and configuration) data from management tools, native platforms and interfaces; in particular, Caplan™ 3.2 adds connectors for several data sources, such as: Oracle Enterprise Manager (improved), Ganglia (new), NetIQ AppManager (new), HP uCMDB (new), EMC2 Storage Scope Control Center (improved) and VMware (improved, with vSphere 4 support);
