IBM has announced a raft of products and services around storage, management software and services targeted at what is claimed to be a $122 billion market opportunity for controlling physical infrastructure through digital means.

Among a raft of announcements from several IBM divisions, many of which come under the data center transformation for cloud computing banner, the company said it is introducing IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management software, which brings automation to the management and reporting of energy consumption by non-IT assets - an office building air conditioning system, for example, or streetlights in a city. "With the software, organizations can now generate a variety of configurable reports to help them track and visualize energy dynamics -- and take appropriate action as a result, while extrapolating how changes will yield different business outcomes using sophisticated "what if" calculations,"" the company said.

The products and services target clients who wish to to use computing systems to manage an increasing number of things in their physical infrastructure that are being instrumented with intelligent sensors.

Nick Drabble, Data center transformation leader - Tivoli, at IBM, told DatacenterDynamics, "Energy prices have skyrocketed, legislation is forthcoming which will see companies have to meet reduction targets in CO2 and to buy carbon credits and the power used to run a server is outstripping the capital cost. With 70% of budget being spent on day to day operations we are looking to automate the operational side of IT to bring this down significantly. What we're saying is organisations are running data cetners with utilisation levels that are down. A large proportion of these can consolidate operations on to a minimum number of servers, and potentially turn off servers, and the associated storage. This means you can turn down the air conditioning and by joining together the physical infrastructure and managing it around the IT you can typically halve the energy bill. The starting point will be dictated by the client but the core focus of the dynamic infrastructure announcement is to bring the data center infrastructure into a single set of assets driven by the business."

The company said greater management is partly driven by data centers costs which for "energy, space, etc. have risen eight-times since 1996; and average distributed server utilization is just 6-15%.

A key element of a more efficient infrastructure is previously announced IBM Systems Director software, which can bring order to the jumble of physical and virtual assets that characterize today's data center. The Systems Director software can increase in efficiency of UNIX, Windows, and Linux server platforms. The software's advanced tools can help IT managers control and automate large numbers of physical and virtual servers across hardware platforms including AIX, Windows, Linux, VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Xen, and z/VM.

Through a single interface users can map virtual resources to physical servers; throttle energy consumption up or down as needed; and collect data on hardware temperatures and data center energy use.

Systems Director can automatically monitor remote hardware operations and take proper action based on alerts.

The latest offerings include:

- IBM Service Management Industry Solutions, customized for seven industries: Utilities, chemicals & petroleum, telecommunications retail, banking, electronics and manufacturing.

- IBM service management software and services are available from IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services (IBM's data center arm).

- A new governance consulting practice works with clients to design governance systems to help mitigate risks related to business changes, changing market conditions and regulatory requirements.

- Tivoli Service Automation Manager software, automates the design, deployment and management of services such as middleware, applications, hardware and networks, tasks that today are largely done manually and thus subject to error, time constraints and other human limitations.

The company also announced a financing package.