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Next month, Viridity Software will start shipping EnergyCenter version 2.0. EnergyCenter is data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software that has been enhanced to help customers connect equipment utilization and business value to power consumption, which the company says can reduce power and cooling costs by up to 50%. Enhancements to the software include User-Defined Asset Grouping to group or filter assets based on application, owner and/or contact; VMwareVirtual Guest Power Analysis to uncover virtual machine sprawl and identify underutilized virtual assets; Heat Mapping, graphical overlay reports of top power consumers,underutilized servers and BTU output; and Advanced Auto Alert Ability, which auto-notifies users when specified power and utilization thresholds are exceeded.
Just over a year ago, the Burlington, Mass.-based software developer released the first version of its DCIM offering to tackle the data center energy-efficiency problem head on. EnergyCenter calculates the actual energy consumption of IT devices, such as server chips and hard disk drives, and it puts this benchmark information in a MySQL database. It discovers, inventories and monitors the utilization of all devices in a data center and maps this utilization data to the benchmark information in the MySQL database to create power utilization profiles.
Available as a direct, embedded or modular DCIM solution, the latest release also features an extended Data Center Genome Database (GxDB). The database has added thousands of additional measured server power profiles, as well as storage and switch specifications.
According to a Gartner Research report, "Data Center Power, Cooling and Space: A Worrisome Outlook for the Next Two Years," the data center power, cooling and space problems that were causing such headaches in a very depressed IT market will become significantly worse in an expanding market. Viridity says the DCIM market is still emerging and will take some time to go mainstream. With an addressable market of more than 50,000 data centers, the company expects sales to grow next year and get hot in 2013 and beyond.
IDC's Katie Broderick, senior research analyst, servers and data centers, thinks the most useful features of version 2.0 for enterprise data center managers will be the user-defined asset grouping, VMware Virtual Guest Power Analysis and the Enhanced Import/Export capabilities. "The grouping is essential for data center operators to see the connections in their data center between the physical and virtual levels and between IT and the business," she says. "The integration with VMware is key. These days, IDC is seeing that more and more IT organizations are thinking of their 'number of servers' as the number of logical servers they have. Seeing into the virtual layer is key for power monitoring and management today. The final import/export capability eases the transition to Viridity for new users off from old asset management platforms."
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