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By Cara Garretson
A new software company called Viridity launched on Monday with promises to lower data-center energy costs by monitoring not only hardware, but also the applications that run on it.
Viridity, based in Burlington, Mass., is taking an application-driven approach to data center energy management. This approach will not only allow customers to save money by being able to better understand their utilization --which can lead to balancing their power and cooling consumption -- but will also help data centers enhance service levels and extend the life of their equipment, according to company officials.
The company quotes Gartner Research findings that put power as the second-highest operating cost in 70 percent of data centers this year.
"Today, most organizations focus on just the physical infrastructure - or, how the power is delivered to the data center, as opposed to why it is being consumed. Viridity recognizes that there needs to be a clear connection between the business and the power consumption," said Mike Rowan, Founder and CTO of Viridity Software, in a prepared statement.
The software will help customers model power consumption by tying applications to the IT hardware that run them, Rowan says. The software will also analyze how critical each application is to the customer's business, so that consumption can be prioritized and allocated accordingly, and will also determine functions that can be rebalanced or even eliminated.
Viridity says that for the typical data center, more than 70 percent of the opportunity for energy optimization lies at the application layer, and related power consumption such as cooling is simply a reaction to the application's demand. Organizations that can get a handle on the link between applications and consumption can build usage strategies that run data centers more efficiently, the company says.
Besides taking an application-driven approach to monitoring consumption, Viridity says its software is unlike existing products on the market because it attempts to bridge the gap among the three different groups in any given company that focus on energy usage; the IT department, the facilities department, and the executive team. By offering consumption information that can be easily understood by each group, the software eliminates the disconnect that can lead to companies either powering more systems than they actually need or running out of power.
The software, slated for release during the first quarter of next year, is a lightweight program that runs on a server and doesn't require agents or additional hardware, officials say. It provides a graphical view of a company's data center assets that are mapped to power and cooling data, provided by the company, and ties this information to business applications. Once a data center's needs and utilization have been analyzed by the software, it provides step-by-step instructions for isolating power and cooling inefficiencies. The software also simulates new technology deployments to assess how they will impact consumption.
The company was formed in 2007 by Rowan, and in December of 2008 received more than $7 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. Before Viridity, Rowan founded Revivio that was eventually bought by Symantec.
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