Infrastructure Management Assessment Services is designed to evaluate datacenters IBM Corp. is ready to dispatch “personal trainers” to companies whose data centers are out of shape. On Thursday, IBM is announcing new services called Infrastructure Management Assessment Services designed to evaluate a datacenter’s condition and prescribe ways to whip it into shape.IBM can assess the status of a datacenter’s servers, storage systems, network, security and capacity to support emerging technologies. It can then recommend ways to simplify, standardize and automate the datacenter’s operations, said Dev Mukherjee, vice president of e-business on demand strategy at IBM Global Services.This new portfolio of services is part of IBM’s new Project Symphony, a new family of hardware, software and services aimed at sharply improving the operation of IT systems by automating the optimization of IT systems through self-management technologies. The goal is to match as much as possible the operation of the systems to the workload at any given point, and thus avoid under- or over-utilizing servers, storage devices and the like. Products that are part of the Project Symphony initiative include the IBM Tivoli Intelligent ThinkDynamic Orchestrator system management platform and the IBM Web Infrastructure Orchestration platform for managing Web servers.What’s unique about these new services and the overall Project Symphony initiative is IBM’s effort to tie hardware, software and services together to help users improve the operation of their IT systems, said Marc Jacobson, an analyst at Ovum Ltd. Previously, these efforts have been fragmented, with the services, hardware and software teams acting independently with little coordination among themselves, he said.“IBM is trying to tie all these pieces together and create a coherent offering. That why this is significant,” he said. “It’s a more coherent vision.” The new services being announced Thursday evaluate five key areas in datacenter operations:— systems management, which involves the monitoring of hardware, software and network resources— asset management, which tracks things like inventory of IT hardware and of software licenses — change management, which establishes policies and procedures for implementing changes to the IT infrastructure, such as adding users or modifying software code— service management, which monitors the provision of services— security management, which deals with security-related policies, strategies and protocols “We’re giving customers a health plan to move to a more efficient environment,” Mukherjee said.The services are available now and an introductory assessment starts at around $20,000, he said. Software DevelopmentTechnology IndustrySmall and Medium Business