Officials at -- the name means "greenness" -- argue that today's power monitoring products focus only on the physical infrastructure, giving insight into how power is delivered to the data center but not insight into why it is being consumed.

Viridity's software maps the connections between applications and specific IT equipment, while also analyzing the relative importance to the business of each application. Then it provides step-by-step recommendations to eliminate power and cooling inefficiencies, simulates the potential impact of new technology deployments and enables chargeback.

"They take an application-based view," says David Hill, an analyst with the Mesabi Group. "It's much more sophisticated and much more elegant [than current power monitoring products]. It's the way it should be done."

Analysis tools that look solely at the power usage of servers and other infrastructure aren't necessarily helpful in controlling energy use, because they don't analyze the amount of power the business needs to operate effectively, Hill says.