Even in this age of highly virtualized data centers, the vast majority of servers remain underutilized: In some cases, 80 percent of servers are under 10 percent utilized.

IT professionals that are working in virtualized environments may not even be aware that they're missing one of the key benefits of virtualization. But a new, free application from Viridity aims to give data center owners and operators a quick but thorough analysis of just how much load their servers are carrying.

EnergyCheck is the second application developed by the VC-funded startup -- Viridity released its data center management tool EnergyCenter earlier this year -- and EnergyCheck is designed to provide a non-intrusive way to measure power use.

"Virtualization has changed the data center world as we know it," Steve Keilen, Viridity's Vice President of Marketing and Inside Sales, explained in an interview. "It's helped tremendous in terms of driving higher levels of utilization, but if you don't go through the process of determining what's business-useful, and understand the costs of that utilization, then you still have big room for improvement."

EnergyCheck, which Keilen said can be installed in just seven minutes, will give an energy-usage overview after a week's monitoring, and can factor in a data center's power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio as well as local energy costs to help identify how well utilized a company's servers are, and which machines are driving up costs without providing business benefits.

Even among companies that have embraced virtualization, there are gaps in knowledge of just how well it has been implemented.

A regular case that Keilen said Viridity sees would involve a company that says, "'We're 80 percent virtualized, so we don't need to run EnergyCheck or EnergyCenter.'" Still, Keilen continued, "you're probably going to want to run EnergyCheck anyway so you can find out for sure, you can find the best ways to optimize your servers. Every time we've done that, we've seen there's a lot of room for improvement."

As the screenshot below from Viridity's EnergyCheck discovery process shows, there are often big savings to be had from boosting utilization.

While EnergyCheck is free, Viridity's EnergyCenter is a paid application, but one that offers a deeper dive and bigger ROI than EnergyCheck. Keilen said that although the EnergyCenter system sells for $500 per rack of servers, they're seeing annual savings of anywhere from $88,000 to $245,000 in the first year of use, and that seeing which racks and which servers are the biggest energy hogs has almost immediate payback.

At a time when data centers are running out of power even as bandwidth demands are increasing, Viridity's software can help companies get the most out of every square foot of raised floor space.