For anyone looking to jump into the consolidation toolset on the cheap, Sun offers a free, downloadable Sim Datacenter Java application (www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/simdatacenter) that can calculate the power, heat and space requirements of your current data center versus one with different hardware. (Sun supplies templates for its own and some competing systems, but you can also configure your own.)

Larger companies, however, may well see consolidation tools as a means of saving time and effort. As part of an application consolidation and tracking effort, David O’Neill, executive director of IT at Boise State University, started using a service discovery tool from startup software vendor nLayers. Previously, identifying assets and connections between systems for audit or troubleshooting purposes meant making heavy demands on your systems engineers’ energy. "You put your engineering staff at the whiteboard, give them a couple cans of pop, and they spend the rest of the day drawing pictures," O’Neill says.

With the nLayers tool, O’Neill is able to "let the machine do the inventory," and he can dedicate his engineers to more important tasks. NLayers also claims that its products can map the connections between systems and identify underutilized servers.

If all these tools sound to you like features that should be part of larger-scale asset management, configuration management or business service management tools, BMC Software, IBM and other large vendors want to meet you.

BMC says it already has a suite of tools capable of initial device discovery, performance monitoring and analysis, configuration management and ongoing optimization. What BMC’s suite lacks, according to Dave Wagner, solutions management director for capacity management and provisioning at BMC, is an easy interface to tie all those operations together. But, he says, customers can expect to see the bigger vendors expand and improve their product lines, while the smaller vendors will consolidate or cooperate in order to provide the more wide-ranging management solution large corporations will need.

Who’s Being Served?

No matter how insightful they may become about the technical configuration of your infrastructure, these tools will never be able to map your consolidation efforts to the political and contractual landscape of your corporation.

A word to the wise: Get in touch with the server owners well before you intend to absorb their beloved boxes and applications into your data center. This will help smooth your path as well as help you identify relatively early on in the process if there are good reasons (compliance, security or otherwise) for keeping some seemingly underutilized hardware right where it is.