BMC Software has begun offering its Datacenter Optimization Solution to automate consolidation and virtualisation.

The systems management vendor will fold in services and software to help companies address one of the major challenges in datacentres: to improve the utilisation of servers to reduce costs and improve allocation of resources without adversely affecting security and availability.

Many experts say the proliferation of low-cost appliance servers for specific tasks has created spaghetti-like networks that make datacentres difficult to manage. This trend has also introduced ancillary difficulties such as confusion over software licensing.

“Because the datacentre has sprawled, many customers want a one-off hit to find out where they are today,” said Paul Arthur, director of solutions management at BMC. “They want to ask questions such as, ‘How many systems do I have and how many do I use?’”

Other IT service management (ITSM) firms are following the lead of giants such as BMC, and are basing their offerings on configuration management databases (CMDBs) that act as central repositories for asset and setup information, and are using the Itil standard for systems frameworks and processes.

IET Solutions, for example, has released ITSM 4.0 using a graphical CMDB that allows relationships and dependencies to be visualised.