For those of you who don’t know, we have been working on Centeros V2 for a while. If I’m honest ‘a while’ means almost all of last year. What started off as a re-platform ended up ballooning into a massive exercise taking slightly over a year. We completely re-wrote our backend, moving it from PHP to .net.

While this was, at times, a painful exercise it now gives us a core which should support a continuous improvement style of releases into the foreseeable future. The new architecture also gives us a massive speed increase.

We have spent a lot of time on the interface, bringing a huge number of small usability enhancements online in one large release. We have not focused on new features but instead on pure usability changes. Centeros has always been the fastest way to manage your data center assets, but we are well aware that our customers are dealing with massive amounts of data. So we have focused on making things faster and adding smart usability enhancements, which makes your job even quicker.

Some of the highlights for me include our new universal picker which gives you the ability to search for and pick items without going into the search. This makes creating new elements a breeze.

We have also sped up the creation of new item templates by enabling you to duplicate (clone) an existing one which is close to the one you want to enter. Faster data entry, fewer mistakes, fewer boring repetitive tasks.

As another time saver we improved the process of removing a device. When you create a new task to remove a device it automatically creates all the disconnect tasks.

That probably gives you the flavor, so where to from here? Now we have a refined user interface sitting on an optimized platform it's time to bring forth some new features. We will be releasing these one at a time as quickly as we can.

The first major release will be power monitoring. It seems like everyone we talk to is looking for asset management plus monitoring. Centeros has always been able to manage power consumption based on manufacturers specification, but now we are taking that much further. The application will be able to monitor live power usage across the different devices in your data center.

Monitoring has been under development since Xmas, and is due for release in June.

Back to V2, if anyone wants an online live demo just let us know. We are working on some demo videos whch will be online in a couple of weeks time.

Watch this space.