CiRBA this week announced an updated version of its flagship software that the vendor says will help IT managers not only plan server consolidation and virtualization initiatives, but also provide ongoing analysis of the deployment environment and offer optimization insight.

CiRBA Data Center Intelligence (DCI) 5.0 enables IT managers to build models of existing environments and apply pre-packaged and customized analysis to the environment. The software, once used primarily to plan for migration and capacity, can now run in a continuous mode, offering insight into change impact and potential areas for optimization. The company also added graphical dashboard and e-mail notification capabilities to help more IT and business managers tap into the analysis for the purposes of their jobs. (View this and other intriguing new products in our Products of the Week slideshow.)

"The software looks at all factors of the environment, workload, configuration, capacity, and helps IT best use the pools of virtual resources out there, because usually those pools are in buckets that need to be matched to workloads," says
Andrew Hillier, CiRBA CTO and co-founder. "Version 5.0 takes our analytics and makes it more easily available across the environment for more people to use."

This release has also been updated to incorporate financial metrics and power consumption information into CiRBA's analysis, which the company explains could help IT managers not only design a virtual environment optimized for performance, but also cost.

"There are many cases in which IT can't get any more power into an environment so we wanted to provide that type of information in an easily available and understandable report," Hillier says.

The software installs on a server or group of servers and collects configuration and other data from any IP addressable endpoints using distributed software agents. The software also includes pre-built rules about various applications, systems and other elements to help customer avoid some common "gotchas" when working to consolidate resources. The product analyzes configuration and workload data and identifies consolidation opportunities within the data center. The software compares every server with every other server. Workloads running on every server are also compared with other servers and a 'what-if' analysis is performed that can result in the redistribution of workloads to suit better server utilization.