ARMONK, USA: IBM today introduced a new software for managing data centers. The new technology is claimed to have the potential to cut the cost of operations while speeding the deployment of new applications from weeks to minutes.

The introduction of IBM's new VMControl product for enterprises, combined with IBM Tivoli software, gives businesses for the first time a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. It spans UNIX/Linux, mainframe, x86 and storage systems and networks, said a press release.

VMControl helps companies that have turned to virtualization - the creation of multiple virtual servers or storage on a single physical system - to reduce infrastructure costs, but have encountered new struggles as they try to manage enterprises made up of disparate platforms, each with their own virtualization technology.

The new technology also allows combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity. This approach - known as system pooling - expands the benefits of virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify complex management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as processing power, memory and storage.

Centralizing control of virtualized environments brings new intelligence to data center operations. Companies can manage their vast pools of information and processing resources and parcel them out to applications when and where they're needed.

This breakthrough capability not only increases the overall capacity utilization of the IT infrastructure to lower capital, operational and energy costs, and improves application availability, but gives IT managers the flexibility to adapt to new demands being prompted by the surge of data from Internet-connected devices.

"IBM has provided Winn-Dixie with many innovative solutions to help us increase productivity, maximize our resources and save money for more than 15 years," said Charlie Weston, group vice president, Information Technology for the Jacksonville, Fla.-based grocer. "We are extremely confident that the launch of the VMControl product will be equally as successful for IBM's customers."

The new product, together with IBM Tivoli software, helps companies address and improve service and reduce cost and risk. IBM also announced a new version of Tivoli Provisioning Manager that provides enhanced automation of the manual tasks of provisioning and configuring servers, operating systems, middleware, software applications, storage and network devices.