Developer of management software for physical and virtual IT environments Univa announced development plans for a new reference architecture and software stack for optimization of virtual and physical IT assets in data centers.

The actual product roadmap is still taking shape but the cornerstone of Univa's future offerings is the concept of "continuous optimization". The software stack will ensure optimal policy compliance, making changes dynamically and automatically.

Univa CEO Gary Tyreman said the solution would address "fundamental changes" that have occurred in the data center market. "Large consumers of compute resources everywhere are facing new challenges as a result of innovations like multi-core systems, large memory, high-density servers and cloud computing," he said.

"Some organizations may even face diminishing utilization in their environments, and that can cost millions of dollars and introduce lags in delivery timelines."

The offerings will cover resource sharing, productivity of people and processes, application and license utilization. The solution will integrate and orchestrate provisioning, resource management, workload scheduling and management, policy management and compliance, virtualization and cloud management.

The software creates and configures elements being managed automatically. Possible actions may include physical or virtual server provisioning, or configuration changes to servers, storage or network resources to move workloads to or from a cloud environment.

The approach will allow customers to "layer" different types of management software into the infrastructure as required, addressing specific gaps in efficiency or utilization.