CA Technologies has announced the expansion of its presence in the Data Center Infrastructure Management market with its launch of CA Data Center Infrastructure Management 4.0 (CA DCIM), its next generation solution that leverages and extends the company's technology for monitoring, managing and optimizing the use of power, cooling, space and assets in the data center.

CA DCIM 4.0 enables customers to collect power and environmental information from data center facilities and IT systems in order to better, analyze, report, alert and control the data center environment. It's designed to help decision-makers to more effectively understand energy consumption and use, visualize data center space, place and locate data center assets, manage asset lifecycle, perform root-cause analysis and plan capacity.

As a result of these capabilities, customers can reduce costs, improve service levels and respond more quickly to change. CA DCIM 4.0 also enables customers to integrate the management of their data center infrastructure with the management of IT to better meet the needs of the business.

CA DCIM 4.0 introduces a variety of enhancements, including:

Improved IT asset discovery and monitoring for better identification of potentially underutilized equipment;

Expanded integration gateway functions for improved data capture;

3-D visualization of thermal environment for discovering hot spots that indicate inefficiencies and potential threats to critical IT services;

Simplified analysis, identification and recommendation of available rack space based on multiple factors;

Integration with CA Executive Insight for Service Assurance; and

Expanded integration with Cisco EnergyWise.

In addition to integrating with IT management tools such as service desks, change management systems, configuration management databases, workload and virtualization management tools, CA DCIM 4.0 enables customers to leverage facilities management systems such as BMS, power distribution, HVAC, and environmental sensors—unifying them for data center monitoring, troubleshooting, optimization and planning.