Tideway, a provider of data center search software, has launched Tideway Foundation 7.2. The latest version of Tideway's award-winning automated discovery and application dependency mapping software aggregates critical hardware reference and software end-of-life data traditionally spread across multiple vendors and asset management systems. The new features give organizations a single platform from which to analyze power consumption statistics for business applications, view their carbon footprint, and ensure end-of-life, unsupported software is not being used in production applications.

According to industry analysts, an estimated seventy percent of data centers will experience a disruptive incident related to space, power, or cooling by 2011. Foundation 7.2 combines discovered data about hardware assets with manufacturers' specifications on the power use, heat output and rack space used by each hardware component in the data center to optimize resources. Users can create customized hardware inventory views sorted by heat output, power use, space, or efficiency (measured in kilowatt hours per rack unit) and combine them with Foundation's application modeling to help map and track the carbon footprint of a distributed business application.

Foundation 7.2 also delivers enhanced capabilities to track end-of-life dates to manage data center software through the entire lifecycle, from introduction to retirement, and reduce the support costs and business risks for aging software. It combines automatically discovered data about software versions in the environment with known end-of-life information from vendors to track software aging on an ongoing basis. Users can ensure standardization and compliance and avoid costly fees by having end-of-life, end-of-support and end-of-extended-support information easily accessible and mapped to precisely where the software exists in the data center. Both the expanded hardware reference data and end-of-life tracking in Foundation 7.2 are powered by Tideway's Knowledge Update Service (TKU), a continuously updated, community-directed library of configuration information that catalogs software and hardware assets and business applications running in data centers.