Sentilla released the latest build of what it calls its data center performance management (as opposed to data center infrastructure management, or DCIM) software, adding predictive modeling functionality and other features.

The core feature that differentiates Sentilla v5 from its previous iterations is the ability to give IT managers an idea of how their infrastructure will behave if they deploy an application on dedicated servers, virtual machines, or one of the three types of cloud infrastructure. The software also now takes into consideration future location of the application within the data center and which hardware it will be deployed on.

Bob Ertl, senior director of product management at Sentilla, said not only can you now predict how deploying an application will affect the infrastructure, the software will also tell you the steps you need to go through to deploy the app.

“You can do things like see what is going to happen when you deploy SAP on a set of VMs hosted on pre-defined blades,” Ertl said. “The system will give you a list of tasks that need to be done to deploy it.”

The predictions include things like power consumption, CPU utilization and more. When doing a tech refresh, for example, it will go as far in its predictions as to tell you the size of the power-consumption “bump” you will have in your data center when installing new servers while the old servers you are replacing are still running.

Other new features include the addition of SMIS capabilities. SMIS is a protocol Sentilla can now use to get better access to data from storage arrays from companies like Hitachi and EMC.

“SMIS is a fairly new protocol that the storage vendors have all gotten behind,” Ertl said. Sentilla can now talk to individual components within a storage device, like logical storage units, CPU utilization within controllers, IO counts, etc.

Sentilla’s strategy in the DCIM market is to focus on performance management rather than monitoring and control of facilities infrastructure. Customers “don’t want us to control their chillers,” Ertl said. “They don’t want us to turn things on and off. It’s just a whole different expertise.”

According to him Sentilla aims to be to data centers “what business-intelligence is to sales.”