Symantec has launched new capabilities for its Veritas Server Foundation (VSF) suite designed to simplify the management of enterprise datacentres and provide additional patch management functionality.

A new Application Director feature enables administrators to automate the control of applications across physical and virtual environments, according to their own defined policies, boosting flexibility and availability, according to Kevin Bailey of the Symantec Data Centre Foundation.

"It's part of our forward-looking plan to take the complexity out of datacentre management," he said. "With the increase in mergers and acquisitions, SOAs, the proliferation of servers out there and use of virtualisation, a lot of complexity has crept in."

Another new element of the VSF is Patch Manager, which centralises and automates the scanning of hardware and software and manages the distribution and rollback of patches to simplify and reduce costs, Bailey added.

Existing elements of the suite, Provisioning Manager and Configuration Manager, have been also upgraded to include better integration into the VSF and support for all major hardware platforms.

Roy Illsley of analyst Bulter Group said the support for virtualisation would appeal to firms, but although the new features add richness to the suite, they may not tempt new enterprise customers.

"If you are already a Symantec customer it will give added value, but if I were an IT director I would see how the market plays out in the next six to nine months," he argued. "Customers are looking for a tool to manage the entire datacentre and you can't get that from one vendor yet."

In related news, more than a third of datacentres are badly managed, and have run out of space, power or cooling capacity with insufficient notice, according to a new survey by datacentre software provider Aperture Technologies.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said their capacity planning procedures were below average, while 90 percent said that assessing future infrastructure needs was a medium or high priority.