IBM has been exploring the use of virtual-world technology both for itself and as a service offering. IBM's current efforts include Project Big Green, IBM's Virtual Data Center in Second Life, and separately, on an OpenSim server, IBM Dallas Global Solutions Center is monitoring more than 130 devices as of June 2008. According to IBM, the 3-D data center models "receive data from live enterprise managers such as IBM Director, Enterprise Workload Manager, Tivoli Omegamon and MQ Series. With the available SDK, other data sources are easily integrated. By aggregating information from these management systems and presenting it in a familiar 3-D space, managers are able to respond quickly to alerts and events on demand."

(See video about Project Big Green, which IBM expects to use to help planners and administrators with power management, to double computing capacities without using more power. )

According to IBM, the 3-D data center models "receive data from live enterprise managers such as IBM Director, Enterprise Workload Manager, Tivoli Omegamon and MQ Series. With the available SDK, other data sources are easily integrated. By aggregating information from these management systems and presenting it in a familiar 3-D space, managers are able to respond quickly to alerts and events on demand.... The modeling and simulation capability can also be used for exercises in space, power and cooling planning, training, and disaster-recovery scenarios. Users can move assets, interact with them, and drive them with real or simulated data."

Nor is Second Life the only, ahem, game in town. Other players in the 3-D/immersive/virtual-world arena include Forterra Systems Inc., which is focusing on scalable environments for enterprises, and Qwaq, which provides 3-D virtual collaboration solutions for enterprises, aiming at the enterprise by supporting tools already used to create 2-D and 3-D information, for example, 3-D objects made using Google SketchUp, and the ability to create extensions using standard languages like Python.

Having distributed centers, or one big one, is a good reason to consider using a virtual-world approach, suggests ThinkBalm's Driver.

But using virtual worlds for monitoring IT is far from ready for prime time.

"We're in a phase where we recommend this is a great experimental era," says Steve Nelson, EVP and chief strategy officer of Clear Ink, a digital marketing company that's added virtual-world development to its services portfolio. "You don't yet want to be doing mission-critical tasks, because of the state of things."

Unless you're a major government agency or Fortune 500 company committed to leading-edge technologies, it's too soon to whip out your big-bucks checkbook—today's offerings aren't yet at the off-the-shelf commodity-priced stage. They may not support all the protocols and interfaces you want; the software and systems you want to monitor may not be able to talk with them; and there may not be "objects" to represent them.

However, you don't have to—and shouldn't—wait. There's a lot you can do easily and affordably to start familiarizing yourself with virtual world technology. (See How to Get Started in Virtual-World Operations.)

Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer based in Newton Center, MA. His website is www.dern.com and his technology blog is TryingTechnology.com.