Viridity helps organizations keep energy footprint under control

When, exactly, do you need to provision a new server? Which storage devices and racks consume the most energy in your data center? Can you get away with delaying an expansion?

New management software from Viridity Software of Burlington, Mass., proposes to help data center and IT managers answer these questions -- with a goal of helping businesses avoid unnecessary expansion or over-provisioning scenarios. In other words, Viridity's software aims to claim all the existing capacity possible while conserving power draw.

Virdity’s EnergyCenter basically helps measure and manage actual power usage from the rack perspective, so not only can an IT team keep tabs on what each device is doing, they can also look at consumption trends in aggregate and over time.

Mike Tresh, director of product marketing and management for Viridity, says key features of EnergyCenter include energy measurement capabilities; dashboards for monitoring actual utilization in the context of business priorities (in other words, you can understand which applications might be compromised by power fluctuations, instead of just seeing the hardware point of view); and trending information, because no data center infrastructure remains static, so why would power usage?

Viridity also offers a discovery engine that can get these measurement capabilities for your data center environment into place more quickly. One drawback is that it CANNOT currently pull this information from existing enterprise management software, although that’s something the company is working on, according to Viridity executives.

The starting price for the software is $25,000. Steve Keilen, vice president of marketing for Viridity, says the application will be priced on a per rack, per annual subscription basis.