Datacentre management software specialist Platespin has announced a major update to its PowerRecon suite designed to support firms' green datacentre initiatives with new tools for analysing and modelling power and cooling requirements.

Unveiled today, PowerRecon 3.0 features new functionality for modeling the effect server consolidation will have on power and cooling requirements, server workload forecasting capabilities, enhanced scalability, support for geographically distributed datacentres, and customisable reporting capabilities.

Patrick Malaperiman, regional director for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Platespin, said the new functionality would help datacentre managers collect datacentre information required to undertake properly planned server consolidation and virtualisation projects.

"A lot of companies are trying to reduce their power requirements by bringing virtualisation and optimisation into their datacentre without knowing precisely how many servers they have and what the utilisation levels are," Malaperiman said. " PowerRecon helps you get an inventory of servers and utilisation levels, and work out which servers are candidates for virtualisation or consolidation."

Malaperiman added that the new power and cooling management functionality also allowed firms to assess energy requirements before and after datacentre changes, and model how different scenarios could reduce power needs. "The aim is to help datacentre managers plan changes better," he said. If you are making major datacentre changes you shouldn’t be [monitoring the changes] by waving your finger in the air."

In related news,The Green Grid consortium of IT companies this week revealed that it has enjoyed considerable support since its official launch earlier this year, with 28 new companies, including BT, Cisco, Juniper networks and Rackspace, signing up to the group in the past two months.

The growing ranks of the consortium - which now numbers 39 companies including hardware giants AMD, Intel, HP, Dell and IBM - increase the likelihood of it achieving its stated goal of fostering industry-wide agreement on energy efficiency metrics and best practices for developing and operating green IT kit.

"The industry has enthusiastically responded to the formal launch of The Green Grid," said John Tuccillo, director of The Green Grid. "We welcome our new members and invite other industry leaders to consider membership."

Separately, the consortium said that it would also host its inaugural technical summit later this month to begin work on developing a standard datacentre energy efficiency metric and establishing best practice advice for datacentre managers.