IT configuration management firm Tideway Systems is factoring energy into the roster of metrics it measures.

The four-year-old company will next week publish guidelines for IT departments to better allocate datacentre resources and is expanding its coverage of hardware power draw and thermal characteristics. Power management has become an increasing problem for IT chiefs in recent years as soaring power costs and the trend towards ultra-dense equipment have raised bills.

Tideway said that by measuring application needs against known power requirements of servers, it could help firms improve utilisation.

“Businesses that are information-intensive actually consume a huge amount of power,” said Tideway marketing vice-president Kosten Metreweli. “We can find hardware, identify it and know about its power consumption and heat dissipation characteristics. It gives customers a different cut across data so they can consider consolidating applications to make IT run more effectively. That in turn provides a linkage to the business – you can’t justify it if you can’t cost it.”

Configuration and asset monitoring tools are being widely deployed to map complex IT infrastructures and thereby help save on licences, improve server utilisation, and reduce exposure to dependencies.

“The sheer horror [we felt when we deployed Tideway and other tools] was how much we had,” said Stephen Ashton, director of global IT business management at Dresdner Kleinwort. “The estate was vast.”