San Francisco-based developer of data center monitoring software Modius has added features to its OpenData solution that enable data center operators to implement chargeback mechanisms for power and cooling costs associated with supporting individual customers.

OpenData 3.5 has the ability to unify data from heterogeneous equipment into user-defined groups and report on these groups' energy consumption. The groups can consist of racks, rows, zones or customers.

Jay Hartley, chief scientist at Modius, said the release raised the level of data center operational maturity. "Our new features provide facility managers with custom views of actionable intelligence from diverse equipment sources," he said.

"Reports can reflect operational perspectives like zones or racks, or business perspectives like external customers or internal cost centers."

Other new features included in the latest build include new reports for tracking current values by flexible groups;new statistical analysis tools for calculating energy consumption and other performance metrics;and better visualization and subsystems to identify performance anomalies, patterns and trends across different equipment groups

Here's a list of OpenData's new data mining capabilities:

• New user-defined device tags: New multi-point tagging structure allows users to create flexible groupings that align with business operations (e.g., racks, rows, zones or customers)
• New current value tabular reporting: New native reporting structure leverages device tags to enable data 'roll-ups' and other groupings for analysis of current values (e.g., total by customer group)
• New historical and statistical analysis reporting: Additional reporting capabilities with statistical analysis (e.g., minimum, maximum, or average time integration) and other user-defined arithmetic calculations
• Improved visualization tools: Updated graphic visualization capabilities enable simplified identification of performance anomalies, patterns and trends
• Major upgrade to web services interface: Updated web services interface allows richer integration with other reporting or data center management products for federating data and unifying operations