Sun Microsystems today unveiled an inventory management offering that it claims is the first to deliver one-click discovery across systems running Solaris and Linux.

Sun Connection Inventory Channel is free for Sun customers and is designed to allow system administrators and IT operators to discover, organise and report on IT assets.

Customers can manage their IT assets by tracking critical information including product type, product version, licensing and registration status and support contract ID number.

"Sun is continuing to expand its offerings to help customers more efficiently manage their data centres," said Steve Wilson, vice president of connected systems at Sun.

"The Sun Connection Inventory Channel provides a simple, powerful way for customers to track, sort, search and group their IT assets and support contracts.

"Ultimately, by automating the process, customers are able to easily understand their assets and make better informed IT decisions for the future."

Many IT administrators have complex management mechanisms in place to benchmark the health and performance of their IT operations.

But often they do not have a single view of the software, systems and storage they have, or where these assets are running.

While some products offer partial automation, keeping track of inventory, managing new additions and tracking removals is difficult, error prone and often requires manual processing.