Cassatt in the News

A crew of folks from Cassatt presented Active Profiling Service, a new service offering, and Active Response 5.2, a product update for the company’s orchestration and automation product. I was very interested in learning more because Cassatt has long been helping organizations discover and then make best use of their systems (industry standard systems and important midrange systems), workloads on those systems, storage systems used by those systems, networking resources being used by those systems and even has developed connections to the datacenter power and cooling equipment. (For more information please see Cassatt’s Bill Coleman on Cutting Datacenter Energy Waste, Active Response - Cassatt’s Take on Green Computing, or Processing virtualization and green computing). Cassatt is taking another step to make the implementation of in-house cloud computing environments straightforward for its customers.

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The technology industry, which resisted the economy’s growing weakness over the last year as customers kept buying laptops and iPhones, has finally succumbed to the slowdown.

“We have never seen anything like this in history,” said William T. Coleman III, a Silicon Valley veteran who founded the software maker BEA Systems and is now chief executive at a start-up called Cassatt.

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Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house.

Coleman observed that most IT professionals aren't comfortable outsourcing the mission-critical parts of their sensitive internal applications to an external cloud provider.

"They are concerned," he said, "about availability, vendor lock-in, not having the control they need and having to rebuild these applications from scratch with proprietary tools running on provider-specific platforms."

So Cassatt's updated offerings leverage its data center expertise and technology so customers can implement cloud-style computing environments using their existing systems, inside the firewalls of their datacenters, without having to modify their current hardware or software.

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No enterprise is going to put anything important in a public cloud for a very long time. If you run the IT infrastructure for any significant-scale enterprise your current reality tends to be a bit sobering if not downright depressing.

Your data centers are a mix of many different server flavors, operating systems, application platforms, and even virtualization technologies that no cloud provider can currently support without major expense and disruption.

To consider an internal cloud, CIOs are going to have to get over a few hurdles.

* First, they need to know what they have in their data centers and what it's currently doing (or, as is often the case, not doing).
* Second, they have to find a way to start incrementally, on a project that will show sufficiently strong payback to warrant the next project, and the next.
* Third, they can't disturb what's already working.
* Finally, they have to be able to work with their current security and compliance systems.

So what do you do to get in on the benefits of cloud computing without security or economic risk? You build an internal cloud to reproduce some of the benefits of cloud computing inside your own firewall. Even Gartner believes internal clouds will become a reality.

This week, Cassatt announced software and a new service that it says can transform an organization's existing IT infrastructure into an internal compute cloud.

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You may be one of the data center administrators that’s heard the buzz about the cloud, and has decided that it’s just hype. But the advantages of the cloud infrastructure are clear:

* Extremely low operating costs (as low as 1/10 traditional IT costs)
* Extremely high energy efficiency
* Extremely low levels of complexity
* High economies-of-scale
* Metered billing (based on use); transparent costs
* Other benefits of large data centers without owning capital

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What if you could have all the operational benefits of an external cloud service without worrying about security, compliance and loss of control. That’s pretty much what Cassatt Corp. is offering with its new set of services and software aimed at streamlining the creation of internal cloud architectures.

The company has devised a two-step process for creating a cloud behind the enterprise firewall using existing enterprise computing, storage and network resources.

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Arthur Cole spoke with Steve Oberlin, co-founder/chief scientist, Cassatt Corp..

Cole: Cloud computing is usually thought of as an external resource — the leasing of data center capabilities from an outside provider. But there's also talk of internal clouds that offer the same functionality behind your own firewall. What do you think are some of the considerations when evaluating either option?
Oberlin: Using external cloud resources is a great option if you are a start-up or for new applications. But every established business has a starting point, and that means your IT infrastructure is probably already a heterogeneous mix of platforms and architectures. That can make migration to an external cloud complicated and expensive, and some applications with strict performance, security or compliance requirements may never be good candidates for external clouds. What IT departments would really like to do is run their own data centers with the efficiency of Amazon or Google. That's what Cassatt can help people do, create efficient "internal clouds" using their existing mix of apps and resources.

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There are a number of steps an organization could take after successfully executing a server consolidation strategy. One of them is to orchestrate workloads to make maximum use of physical server capacity, reduce power consumption, reduce administrative and operational expenses and create an environment which can assure that each and every workload can meet service level objectives.

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Ken Oestreich, of Cassatt, posted his own review of Paul Maritz’s vision of a virtual datacenter operating system. It can be found here. As one might expect, it points out that others, including Cassatt, Virtual Iron and others have been implementing versions of this concept for quite a while.

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Anyone allowing their search engine of choice to filter through Google's googols of bytes of data on the Web relating to "cloud computing" has during 2008 been rewarded with an exponentially increasing number of hits. But who are the companies currently most involved and what are their current offerings? SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal zeroes in on the facts and the faces behind this white-hot Enterprise IT technology trend.

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Utility Computing has been with us for a while, in fact since 1961. The idea is to sell 'cycles as a service'; just strap a meter onto a server and then the user pays for whatever computer time they use. It is much like any other utility such as gas, electric, cable, etc.

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I didn’t know this, but I guess yesterday was “Power IT Down Day.” Hewlett-Packard, Citrix and Intel joined forces to propose the idea of asking PC users to install power management software that can decrease the power use of their machines when not in use.

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Internal Clouds Give You Efficiency and Experience While Avoiding the Stormier Problems

Bill Coleman, CEO, Cassatt Corp.

Cloud computing is gaining attention among technologists and the wider public, yet its definition remains a bit, well, cloudy. If you wouldn't mind one more cloud computing definition, I rather like mine.

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Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation) has more than 30 years of corporate and entrepreneurial leadership experience. Prior to Cassatt, he founded and was the first chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, the world’s leading infrastructure software company.

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Sometimes the path to a greener data center happens in small steps that appear obvious but often are left undone. “It’s your mother’s old advice: ‘Turn off the lights when you leave the room,’” said Bill Coleman, CEO of Cassatt and keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in Burlingame, Calif.

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This is James Turner for O'Reilly Media. I'm talking today with Bill Coleman, founder, Chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corporation. Before starting Cassatt, Bill co-founded web application powerhouse, BEA. Bill will be keynoting O'Reilly's Velocity Conference this month discussing green data centers.

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Cassatt Active Response, Standard Edition, was recently named as a finalist in the category of “Infrastructure Software” in the 8th Annual eWeek Excellence Awards.

The eWEEK Excellence Awards program are intended to “provide the benchmark by which enterprise IT professionals can assess a wide range of technology products and services,” according to eWeek.

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In honor of the demo goddess, my chat with the good folks of Cassatt was rescheduled four times. They had to reschedule. I had to reschedule. A fire alarm forced a reschedule. Finally, on the forth try, we connected and I was able to see a most impressive demo of Cassatt’s recently announced Active Response 5.1. It was worth the wait. I saw the product turn on an off computing resources based upon workload limits and polices. Organizations could most certainly see savings based upon proper utilization of equipment, reduction in administrative staff time and, increasingly important, reductions in power utilizaiton and heat production.

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Cassatt Corp. CEO Bill Coleman says data centers are wasting as much as 90% of the electricity they consume because nobody is sure what application is running on which server at any given time. Consequently, every server is kept on all of the time, resulting in an extraordinary waste of electricity.

According to Coleman, over the last five years data centers have become “way too complex,” with more and more functions added on willy-nilly. Servers are connected in arbitrary ways, Coleman told EnergyTechStocks.com. Consequently, he said, every server is kept turned on even on weekends, a time when a data center really only needs to run on about 3% to 4% of its maximum power. Of course, the more servers there are on, the greater the need to cool the data center building, thereby adding to the power wastage.

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As the world struggles to meet what is expected to be a 100% increase in electricity demand by 2030, the information technology industry is wasting an extraordinary amount of power, according to Bill Coleman, CEO of privately-held Cassatt Corp., a California-based company whose software is designed to increase the efficiency of data centers.

In an interview with EnergyTechStocks.com, Coleman said data centers waste up to 90% of the electricity they use. Because data center power consumption, which today represents 1.5% of all electricity consumed in the U.S., is expected to grow sharply, accounting for 3% of all U.S. consumption within five years, Coleman’s 90% estimate, if accurate, represents not only an extraordinary squandering of the world’s natural resources. It also represents a huge untapped opportunity for America – and the world – to avoid the financial and environmental cost of building new power plants.

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San Jose, Calif.-based Cassatt Corp. has added new features to its Active Power Management software this month, including better integration with other software and hardware and the ability to turn off idle servers with demand-based policies.

Cassatt Active Response can monitor application demand and shut down servers as needed and add them back automatically, said Jay Fry, the VP of marketing for Cassatt.

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Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the high costs of maintaining and cooling servers: A mid-tier $2,500 server can cost as much as $2,020 to power and cool annually, according to the Uptime Institute. Thus, demand for ways to curb those expenses is rising as well.

Strategies such as server consolidation and virtualization are gaining momentum as a means of reducing server head count. Once you're down to as few servers as you need to meet peak demands, however, there are still inevitably times when you're wasting substantial energy powering idle machines that are waiting for something to do.

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I know some IT managers are extremely skeptical of products or software that promise to cut power to servers or storage that’s idle. But power management or demand response is becoming a much more common conversation among data center professional, one that developer Cassatt hopes to influence.

The company’s Active Response product, which just got a major update to version 5.1 this week, provides a new feature that lets managers define when a predictable (or unpredictable) power usage situation will trigger a shutdown of the infrastructure involved. Let me repeat that: The manager defines what is or is not an acceptable situation. So, for example, servers typically used for application or code testing, which sit idle a lot of the time, could be scheduled to power up only when necessary and then power down again when a test is done. Servers that become idle for a certain period of time could likewise be directed to shut off.

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When it comes to lowering energy costs in the data center, there are two ways to go about it: more efficient hardware designs featuring low-power components and more efficient cooling systems, and new software platforms that make better use of available resources.

To date, the software side of the equation has centered largely on virtualization. Improving the utilization rate of servers and storage is one of the surest ways to cut energy bills, even if it does lead to increased networking infrastructure to handle the data flow.

Now it seems that new breeds of management software are coming down the pike with an eye toward improving energy consumption and automating many of the labor-intensive system oversight tasks in the enterprise.

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After estimating that even completely idle servers burn more than 50% of their rated power, Cassatt, a software company named after the 19th century Impressionist painter, did something about it by introducing the Active Power Management solution. Much like a domestic dimmer switch, the program works by creating an automated environment, in which data center consumption is tuned down during periods of marginal demand.

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Dynamic Resource Allocation, Management For Servers and Applications

Formerly known as Collage, Cassatt Active Response is an automated, dynamic server resource management platform for Windows, Linux, and Solaris servers. Collage provides both for the automated initial deployment of application and O/S images to servers, and additionally provides continuous monitoring of server and application health, with the ability to reassign resources dynamically--based on administrator defined performance goals--to keep application performance within designated operational levels.

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Cassatt Corp. is betting soaring energy costs combined with increasing green initiatives in IT will make a new feature in Cassatt Active Response data center management software quite appealing. With the release of version 5.1 today, users of the San Jose-based company's tool will be able to set policies that let you turn servers off because the Cassatt program detects the machine is idle.

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According to a Cassatt survey, two-thirds of IT and facilities personnel consider their data center energy efficiency "average" or worse, and are addressing these concerns with long-term virtualization projects while failing to implement simpler short-term steps like turning off unused computers.

Sixty-nine per cent of respondents said their organizations were were pursuing server consolidation/virtualization strategies and nearly 49 per cent were pursuing storage consolidation/virtualization.

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Running a lights out, virtualized data center is a bit like the quest for nirvana. It may be a worthy aspiration, but actually getting there takes a great deal of effort and, for most of us, probably won't be realized any time soon. Neither goal is easy. Running lights out or achieving nirvana each require a complex series of incremental changes that, when all goes well, yields improvements that move us another step closer to the objective.



In the case of virtualized, lights out operations, even knowing when you achieve the objective can be tricky because the term is defined a few different ways. It can truly mean lights out with no-one on site, or can be a "dim-lights" facility with a dedicated employee on hand. In some lexicons, lights out can even mean handing off operations to a co-location facility, explains Joe Brown, president of Accelera.

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Last week at the Uptime Institute Symposium, I met with Ken Ostereich of Cassatt and we chatted about the need for a radical change in data center design and operations in order to achieve the Uptime Institute’s challenge for end users to reduce energy consumption in the data center by 50% over the next 36 months. Ostereich observed that the proposed solutions are so incremental, a 50% reduction isn’t likely.

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The items in your physical data center generate a lot of heat. Steve Brasen, storage analyst at consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates (www.enterprisemanage
ment.com), says that a former co-worker actually keeps his garage warm by using an old storage system with an antiquated power supply. “He said it works better than a commercial heating system!” Brasen says.

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According to Wikipedia, Earth Day is “one of two different observances, both held annually during spring in the northern hemisphere, and autumn in the southern hemisphere. These are intended to inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. The United Nations celebrates an Earth Day each year on the March equinox, a tradition which was founded by peace activist John McConnell in 1969. A second Earth Day, which was founded by U.S. politician Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in in the late 1960s, is celebrated in many countries each year on April 22.” A couple of enterprising virtualization technology companies have done their best to use this event to highlight their technology.

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Since yesterday was Earth Day, I’m sure all you data center managers were out hugging trees, riding your bicycles to work and watching An Inconvenient Truth. But that was yesterday. Today, reality in the data center hits again. And the reality is that many of you aren’t that concerned with data center energy efficiency. I know, it’s a downer. But there are some hints of a silver lining if you can hold on a bit.

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In two separate studies it was noted that the “green” movement is not catching on quickly in most data center environments in the US. One study conducted by Cassatt entitled “2008 Data Center Efficiency Survey” and another conducted by BPM Forum and sponsored by BlueArc entitled “Reducing IT Energy Drain for Business Gain. The energy focus of each study eventually leads to information gathered regarding the lack of attention being provided to “green” policies by most data center facilities.

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Nearly two-thirds of IT and facilities staff consider the energy efficiency of their data centre to be 'average' or 'worse than average', new research reveals.

A survey conducted by Cassatt Corporation found that the biggest source of energy wastage is in development and test environments.

More than a quarter of respondents said that more than 60 per cent of their development and test servers are idle during off-peak hours.

However, 62 per cent are working on a data centre energy efficiency projects now or expect to within the next year.

The Cassatt 2008 Data Center Energy Efficiency Survey revealed that virtualisation ranks highest on the energy-efficiency project list.

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The majority of IT personnel believe their data centre energy efficiency is not good, according to a new report.

According to the Cassatt 2008 Data Center Energy Efficiency Survey, more than two thirds of IT and facilities workers said the energy efficiency of their data centre was either average or worse.

Most put this down to the fact that their development and test servers are idle during off-peak hours.

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Cassatt ran a survey of of Data Center professionals, and published a press release.

One of the first areas I advise clients is to start energy savings projects in their performance, development, and test labs to quantify the savings, allowing them to filter the greenwashing from real savings. Even though everyone wants to get solutions in the data center, it makes sense to take the first steps in your labs. Few labs need to run 24 x 7, and there are multiple servers that can be turned off. But, as Cassatt mentions in its study.

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Nearly two-thirds of IT and facilities personnel consider their data center energy efficiency “average” or worse - and their development and test environments might be the biggest cause of that, according to a survey conducted by Cassatt® Corporation, a leader in providing software to make data centers more efficient.

More than a quarter of survey respondents said that greater than 60 percent of their development and test servers are idle during off-peak hours. There is some good news, though: 62 percent are working on a data center energy-efficiency project now or expect to within the next year, according to the “Cassatt 2008 Data Center Energy Efficiency Survey.” And, contrary to conventional wisdom, 59 percent would consider turning off computers that are idle.

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Nearly two-thirds of IT and facilities personnel consider their data center energy efficiency "average" or worse -- and their development and test environments might be the biggest cause of that, according to a survey conducted by Cassatt.

More than a quarter of survey respondents said that greater than 60 percent of their development and test servers are idle during off-peak hours. There is some good news, though: 62 percent are working on a data center energy-efficiency project now or expect to within the next year, according to the "Cassatt 2008 Data Center Energy Efficiency Survey." And, contrary to conventional wisdom, 59 percent would consider turning off computers that are idle.

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Cupertino High teacher Megumi Shibamiya has an answer for the go-to question posed by generations of math students: When are we ever going to need to know this stuff?

How about when you're designing the next-generation search engine or figuring out how to run a bigger server farm on less electricity. Or how about when you're calculating how rich you are when your company's initial public offering closes the day at $100.34.

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The heat is on energy-zapping data centers to match conservation efforts to consumption. Here, a look at some means to this end

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This chapter summarizes strategies for going green in the data center and is designed to help IT managers create a holistic strategy for a data center efficiency project.

STEP 1: Persuading the C suite to pursue energy efficiency

STEP 2: Measuring data center energy consumption

STEP 3: IT asset management and purchasing decisions

STEP 4: Infrastructure optimization techniques

This is the fifth and final chapter from the e-book: The Green Data Center: Energy efficient computing in the 21st Century.

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There was a time, as you may recall from seventh grade history, when it was taken as fact that the world was flat. Sailors feared falling off the edge of the map. Columbus’ own men once threatened mutiny when it appeared they were headed toward the literal edge of the earth. And yet, as we probably all should know by now, this “fact” was nothing more than myth. Even as evidence began emerging to the contrary, the flat earth myth was so deeply embedded into the minds of our forefathers that many still did not believe they were living on a giant ball for many years after. Data centers and Renaissance thought rarely can claim to have much in common — except, of course, a long-standing reliance on myths that are damaging to their respective well-being. For the Renaissance, this myth constrained exploration and trade. In the world of data centers, pervading myths can negatively affect something just as important: your IT department’s budget. Just like during Magellan’s first circumnavigation, the time has come to expose data center myths for what they are.

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Last fall, I had the opportunity to moderate a roundtable discussion in which a group of CIOs and other senior executives gathered to share their ideas, experiences and priorities as corporate IT leaders. To prepare, I interviewed each participant ahead of time to get a sense of his top concerns so that I could create the agenda.

In light of the buzz we've all been hearing around green computing, I wanted to find out where that topic ranked on their lists. When I asked, I felt a surprising, but distinct, global cooling.

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Everyone is taught the cardinal rule of energy efficiency at an early age: Turn off the light when you leave the room. The reasoning behind that is clear -- little things compounded can have a big effect on the power bill.

The same theory is the basis behind new software from Cassatt that reduces energy consumption in the data center. "Enterprises are looking to more-energy-efficient hardware and quick ways to impact costs, reduce their carbon footprint and declare themselves green," says Sergey Nikiforov, technical alliances manager for San Jose, Calif.-based Cassatt. "The only way to do this is to turn the light switch off."

Using rules-based technology regarding power usage patterns based on factors including time of day, demand and power company curtailment, Cassatt's Active Power Management software turns off servers when idle and then turns them back on again when needed. "Results in power reduction can be up to 50 percent," Nikiforov claims, adding that ROI can be achieved in as little as six months.

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Power management company, Cassatt has joined the Green Grid, a non-profit consortium dedicated to improving energy efficiency in datacentres.

The Green Grid's mission is to promote the development of energy efficient processors, servers, networks and other technology and to promote best practices for datacentres. However, the consortium is not without its critics.

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Merrill Lynch has recently doubled its computing capacity in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) with the launch of a new London datacenter, DWT has learned.

The new 100,000-square-foot facility, built within an existing warehouse, supports the firm's global markets and investment banking as well as its global wealth management businesses within Europe, officials add.

The datacenter currently has the capacity to host 22,000 CPUs, but "we expect that number to increase as the future generations of processors come online in the next few years," says Danny O'Connor, head of global technology infrastructure, EMEA, with Merrill Lynch.

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After looking at data center power consumption figures for my Green Building Elements post, as well as at the US EPA’s Report to Congress calling for improvements in this area, I have noticed a host of new products coming to market that address the issue.

Changes occur so rapidly in the world of technology that new problems — and new solutions — crop up every day. One of the most glaring problems for data centers right now is that their hundreds of servers stay on at full power all of the time. The simple, low-tech solution to this problem (namely, turning the servers OFF) turns out to really not be so simple after all.

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Last year I made a list of data center trends and predictions, that, when I look back now, seems kind of lame, especially in light of Bob Plankers' blog post on data center predictions. But these lists give readers a new year's trend roundup and help ease SearchDataCenter.com's editors back into work mode. So I set out to do a better job this year, got a bit bolder, and hopefully will get more right than wrong this year.

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Got a copy of the Cassatt Energy Efficiency Survey. Highlights are as follows:

From the responses we received from IT professionals and facilities managers we learned several interesting facts:

* 63% of you are either working on a data center energy-efficiency project now or expect to within the next year
* 43% of you have a data center that is within 25% of its maximum power capacity
* 61% of you are aware that the EPA recommends turning off idle servers to save energy, but over 30% say you don’t know how many servers are idle at any given time
* Server power management software is the energy saving strategy that large companies selected most frequently as their next step for the future (29%)

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From the trenches of the datacenter to the corner office, from the eco-minded citizen's living room to the Senate floor, it seemed that just about everyone had green on the brain this past year.

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Over the Christmas holiday vacation, Stanford University shuts down the utilities in more than three-quarters of its 220 buildings on campus but like most organizations, its IT infrastructure stays up and running, said Susan Kulakowski, campus energy manager.

The Stanford, Calif.-based university saves about $250,000 in utility costs during the annual shutdown. It could save more if a portion of its IT infrastructure shut down, but that's not an option, Kulakowski said.

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Due to rising energy costs and energy-guzzling data centers, IT departments have displayed concerns on ways to handle power consumption.

Started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, the Cassatt Corporation is a leader in making efficient data centers by attacking the most problematic issue with data centers - wasted energy. Cassatt’s Active Response product helps customers become more “green” by using energy efficient technologies to lower energy usage and throwing out the idea of having servers stay on full power around the clock, 24/7.

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I was chastised this week by an attendee at a panel I was moderating in San Francisco for using the term “green” to describe strategies intended to better manage energy usage within a data center.

Data centers cannot be green because they aren’t meant to be, my audience member declared. For one thing, storage and server hardware doesn’t take kindly to be switched on and off, he said.

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Bill Coleman, who's best known as one of the founders and the first CEO of BEA Systems, is now the CEO of Cassatt Corp., a utility computing startup he founded in 2003.

I spoke with Coleman last week about how he's positioning his company to take advantage of the green computing rage, and about what he sees happening over the next few years in the IT industry. For one thing, he says we're in for another big bust: "This Web 2.0 stuff will be built out," he says, "and there will be a huge bust based on all of the over-investment in that."

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attended the 2007 Innovation Forum hosted by Indian tech giant, Tata Consultancy Services today. It was a forum focused on the connection between IT, outsourcing, and innovation – particularly how an IT services group such as TCS can be involved in helping their clients engage with more innovative technologies, rather than just low-cost outsourcing.

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Most IT experts agree that data centers and related technologies like Blade PC offer the most comprehensive energy saving solution for commercial PC proliferation. Still, frequent server underutilization and other localized inefficiencies of IT infrastructures are prompting some to look beyond the physical hardware migration to reducing power consumption of datacenters themselves.

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Cassatt’s taking their well established virtualization technology and focusing it tightly on helping organizations create a green computing environment. They’ve launched a new product family, Active Response, that is designed to simplify an organization’s move in that direction.

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Company says app-aware, platform-agnostic software intelligently powers servers off and on as needed

With backing from big-name IT companies such as Sun, Citrix, and Red Hat, Cassatt today unveiled its Active Response 5.0 software suite, capable of actively powering servers on and off as needed and pooling physical and virtual server resources to reduce datacenter energy waste by as much as 50 percent, according to the company.

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Our digitally filled lives would be radically compromised without the power of the data center. Companies know it and invest massively in the equipment and power required to keep those data centers up and running every second of every day. But data centers and the servers that power them are major electricity guzzlers, which is why they have become the latest focal point in the effort to conserve energy.

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A handful of vendors at the Data Center Decisions conference in Chicago gave quick, speed-dating style overviews of their latest and greatest technologies yesterday, including a new Active Power Management tool from Cassatt, 10 Gbit Ethernet (GBE) intelligent network interface cards (NICs) from NextXen, iSCSI SANs from Sanrad Inc. and backup tools from Vizioncore.

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It's simple. Turn servers off when they're not needed.

Virtualization is a hot in datacenter circles these days. The ability to consolidate multiple servers is a money and energy saver. But servers are still often overused, running 24 x 7 in environments where it's not always necessary.

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If you’ll recall, I posted a series on virtualization and green computing back in May. It seems to me that while virtualization technology won’t solve all of the problems of power utilization and heat production in a modern datacenter, the proper use of this technology could certainly help. I was expecting some of the key innovators in virtualization technology to pick up that theme and run with it. Cassatt stepped forward on September 4, 2007 with an announcement that clearly is a step in that direction.

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Cassatt Corporation announced one of its new technology offerings that allow datacenter managers to safely and intelligently power servers off and on as needed to help move toward a greener datacenter.

Cassatt's Active Power Management technology is controlled by policies set by administrators and optimized automatically. It continually optimizes power consumption based on the time of day, demand, curtailments imposed by power companies, or other facilities-based events. And the company said that early tests have shown that customers are experiencing up to 50 percent reduction in their power usage by allowing Active Power Management to turn servers off when idle and then on again when needed.

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Not many massive-scale IT deployments come with a try-before-you-buy option.

But IT consultancy BearingPoint and enterprise software firm Cassatt Corp. are shaping up a new practice offering for financial services that allows banks and brokerages to test the impact of a new data center resource reallocation strategy in a lab environment.

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Kissimmee, FLA. -- Utility software specialist Cassatt and datacenter automation vendor BladeLogic today said they will integrate their software suites to connect how customers allocate resources on-demand and manage software configurations.

The pact, announced at the Gartner's Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit here, is designed to help IT administrators double up on the capital efficiency while minimizing operational costs within their datacenters.

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Since making my foray into the world of grid computing, I have seen no shortage of efforts, solutions and practices dubbed "utility computing." Offerings such as Sun's Network.com, IBM's Blue Gene On-Demand and HP's Utility Computing Services are only the tip of the iceberg, as countless vendors -- from 3Tera to Egenera -- and organizations -- Media Grid, for example -- also have joined the fray, all adding their own spin to the idea of capacity on-demand. Last week, however, I saw utility computing take on what is (to me, at least) a whole new, yet awfully familiar, look.

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If San Jose, CA-based Cassatt Software has its way, some of the bigger IT infrastructure management vendors had better watch their backs.

Cassatt was named after Mary Cassatt, a 19th century American impressionist and revolutionary whose outlook Cassatt Software hopes to emulate.

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I've been following Cassatt for a number of years and have always thought that the company has taken a fresh, different view of the concept of virtualization in the implementation of its product "Collage". In an attempt to catch up with what the company is doing now, I spoke with Jay Fry and Ken Oestreich. After the conversation, I was even more convinced that the company is taking a strategic, not tactical, approach to the concept of virtualization. In bullet form, here are the high points of our conversation.

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I love meeting people who rode one tech wave and have come back for more. They not only understand the big picture, but also present the most intriguing ideas. Last week, I got to meet Bill Coleman -- he's the B in BEA Software -- who now runs a company called Cassatt. Cassatt's tools help large enterprises get the most from their data centers and virtualization efforts. (Companies use Cassatt's tools to ensure service level automation, balance hardware loads, and -- here's the cool part -- dynamically shift hardware resources on the fly. Coleman says most data centers are significantly over-provisioned now, in terms of both hardware and software, and it's easy to see how dynamic shifting of resources could cut costs and improve flexibility.) The technology is interesting stuff, in itself. But Coleman left me with an even more interesting idea: Would you as CIO trust the phone company to run your data center?

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The day after a computer glitch resulted in a seventy minute period when no one seemed to know where the Dow Jones Industrial Average was headed, only to see it drop nearly 200 points in a matter of seconds once reporting was resumed,I was having a much better day than the IT folks at Dow Jones and the New York Stock Exchange.

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Our readers have voted and we’ve tabulated the results for this year’s Datamation Product of the Year Awards. Top honors go to companies across key areas of IT infrastructure, from Enterprise Linux to Wireless Software to Network and Systems Management.

In some categories, like Anti-Spam Software and Enterprise Server, voting was close. The winner won by just a handful of votes. In others, like Enterprise Security and Wireless Software, the award was garnered by a hefty margin.

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Cassatt Corp., a specialist in the growing market for triggering tasks on virtual and physical servers in corporate datacenters, has added more pieces to its flagship Collage software suite.

Collage automatically allocates and controls application server instances and virtual and physical machines, removing some of the manual operations associated with hardware, freeing up administrators to tackle other tasks.

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Software start-up Cassatt this week continued its virtualization march with a new release of its flagship product that adds more support for server partitioning software.

Customers can now test out Collage 4.0. Like its predecessors, the software helps companies treat all of their servers as one large computer. This format makes it easier to free up more processing power or bandwidth to certain applications on the fly. The new release, however, also adds additional server slicing tools.

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Cassatt Corp. has released version 4.0 of its Collage data center management suite which now manages virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine manager (VMM), in addition to VMs running on VMware ESX.

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Cassatt, a start-up selling software geared to automate how a multitude of applications run on a multitude of servers, has expanded its domain a little.

The company plans to announce Monday that its Collage software now can govern two new elements of the data center: virtual machines running on the Xen, and XenSource hypervisors and virtual networks set up on a variety of network hardware.

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How would you like a silver bullet you can drop into your data center and have it take control of business-service flows and reduce costs, all without requiring you to change hardware, software or your systems-management and production controls?

That's the elevator pitch of William Coleman, founder and CEO of Cassatt, a 3-year-old company with a utility computing vision built on virtualization and automation technology.

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Normally, two virtualization companies with silly names forming a sales partnership would not capture our attention. But, people actually seem to use the software from Cassatt and XenSource, so here we are.

Cassatt has secured a reselling deal with XenSource, allowing it to ship XenEnterprise alongside its own software. An "exclusive" deal this is not, since companies aren't exactly fighting for the rights to sell XenEnterprise, and since XenSource isn't really trying to stop anyone from helping it out. Still, if you're dealing with Cassatt and interested in XenSource, this should save you a phone call. Which is nice, unless talking to software salesmen cooks your oats.

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Data center software company Cassatt said on Monday that it will distribute and support virtualization software from start-up XenSource later this year.

An upcoming version of Cassatt's Cross Virtualization Manager (XVM) software will support XenEnterprise, a commercial version of open-source software for running several instances, or virtual machines, of an operating system on a server. Cassatt can already manage virtual machines from VMWare and is adding the XenSource software in response to customer demand, Cassatt executives said. Cassatt's software is used to automate management of data center components, including hardware servers, application servers and virtual machines, to allow applications to respond to changes in computing demand.

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Free software. Bargain chips. The always-on Internet. Today's tech giants are in danger. But the next big boom has already begun.

William Coleman doesn't need to make another fortune in high-tech. He is 58 years old and--twice--has earned more than enough money to retire. The first time came in 1993, when Coleman was 45 and had just quit after eight years at Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ). The second time came a few years later, after he cofounded BEA Systems (nasdaq: BEAS - news - people ), a $1.2 billion (sales) maker of Web software (known as Bill, he is the "B" in BEA); in the bubble his net worth approached the billion-dollar mark. Yet here he is, chasing another tech boom. It's like an addiction, he says. He can't stop himself.

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Ancient Greeks touched oak trees when they wanted Zeus to protect them. Irish farmers nailed horseshoes to their doors with the tips pointed up to keep their luck intact. But in this high-tech age, people have progressed far beyond such superstitions.

Or have we?

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Cassatt Founder and CEO Bill Coleman delivered the opening keynote at the SOA Web Services Edge at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on Monday, June 5. Coleman spoke on the topic, “Software Isn’t IT Anymore.”

The event is being colocated with the Enterprise Open Source Conference and Exhibition and Real-World Ajax Seminar, all of which continue through Tuesday, June 6.

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Into the Valley Anyone gullible enough to believe vendor press releases would wonder why Cassatt even exists. It's a software start-up trying to compete in a server virtualization market dominated by the likes of IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems. And, in fact, these massive companies have already solved the virtualization problem, according to the last three years of their marketing material.

Customers actually trying to improve their data center management situation don't buy this hype. They've watched HP kill off the Utility Data Center project after billing it as the clear future of computing. They've also seen Sun Microsystems do nothing with its acquisition of virtualization godsend Terraspring and scratched their heads when IBM rolled out "heterogeneous" software that only worked with AIX.

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Cassatt Corp. has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Program. With this technology alliance, Cassatt will optimize its flagship product Collage with VMware ESX Server, virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating, and managing servers in mission-critical environments. In addition, Cassatt and VMware plan to provide cooperative support for joint customers.

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Server management start-up Cassatt continues to build out its product portfolio at pace, moving this week into the virtual operating system arena. Cassatt has started shipping a package that can install and control virtual OSes from the likes of VMware, XenSource and Microsoft.

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Cassatt, which already automates provisioning of Linux, UNIUX, and J2EE resources so they can be shoehorned more efficiently into server farms, is now extending the same capability to users of popular virtualization or hypervisor tools.

The new offering, Cassatt Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM), is a plug-in to the company’s Collage flagship offering. It will support the major hypervisors including VMware ESX, VMware Server, Xen, and Microsoft Virtual Server.

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Server software start-up Cassat has introduced a module to enable its core product to control virtual machines as well as the physical machines it now governs.

The Cross-Virtualization Manager module, released Monday, extends Cassatt's Collage software, used to automate management of large numbers of servers. XVM adds the ability to govern which jobs are running on which virtual machines; to move jobs from one to another if a server fails; and start and stop virtual machines, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said.

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The company's new software manages physical servers and virtual machines from VMware, Xen and Microsoft.

Server virtualization startup Cassatt today trotted out a new piece of software that manages the virtual workloads of VMware, Xen and Microsoft.

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Virtualization software startup Cassatt on Monday launched new software to help manage virtual machines from EMC subsidiary VMware, Microsoft, and the Xen open-source project.

As businesses look to virtualization to consolidate applications onto fewer servers, the need to respond quickly to failures or spikes in network traffic becomes more critical, Cassatt said.

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Cassatt Corp. has jumped into the virtualization market with a new software package designed to manage virtual machine images. San Jose, Calif-based Cassatt is led by BEA founder CEO Bill Coleman, and started out as a spinoff of supercomputing company Cray, called Unlimited Scale Inc.

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"The focal point of [our core Collage product] and a lot of what we do is providing a means of logically decoupling applications and operating systems from the hardware upon which it is run, whether the operating systems are Windows, Linux, or Solaris," said Rich Green, executive vice president of products at Cassatt Corporation, a company that provides enterprise software for dynamic and agile IT infrastructures. "Today, it's a decoupling or, conceptually, a virtualization layer that creates dynamism between operating systems and applications at the hardware."

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"Cassatt is enabling IT organizations -- starting with those running BEA WebLogic Server 8.1-based applications -- to change their assumptions about the return they can get on their IT investments," said Bill Coleman (pictured), chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corporation, yesterday as Cassatt announced general availability of the new Cassatt Collage Web Automation Module (WAM), software that helps IT organizations with their server consolidation efforts by providing Java application virtualization and management for Java EE applications.

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Three-year-old start-up Cassatt Corp. in San Jose, is extending its server virtualization software to Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications, the company said Monday.

Instead of dedicating applications to a particular machine or cluster, Cassatt's Collage software creates a virtual pool of application resources and automatically matches up applications to resources as needed, based on service level agreements.

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Cassatt announced general availability of its Collage Web Automation Module. The software, which supports BEA WebLogic Server 8.1, is designed to help IT orgs with server consolidation by providing Java app virtualization and management for J2EE apps.

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Software start-up Cassatt has slotted a new Java software management product into its virtualization line. The Collage Web Automation Module (WAM) marks the company's attempt to give customers greater control over the performance of their Java applications, allowing them to cut down on the number of servers needed to run Java code.

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The company's Collage software creates a virtual pool of application resources and matches up applications to resources as needed based on service-level agreements

Three-year old startup Cassatt is extending its server virtualization software to J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications, the company said Monday.

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Cassatt Corporation has introduced a new Java virtualization solution called "Web Automation Module," built on top of their Collage product, which allows data centers to dynamically deploy server resources based on live service levels rather than allocating servers based on anticipated need.

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Cassatt® has released the new Cassatt Collage™ Web Automation Module (WAM), software that helps IT organizations with their server consolidation efforts by providing Java application virtualization and management for Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications.

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"Cassatt is enabling IT organizations -- starting with those running BEA WebLogic Server 8.1-based applications -- to change their assumptions about the return they can get on their IT investments," said Bill Coleman (pictured), chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corporation, yesterday as Cassatt announced general availability of the new Cassatt Collage Web Automation Module (WAM), software that helps IT organizations with their server consolidation efforts by providing Java application virtualization and management for Java EE applications.

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Cassatt, a start-up hoping to profit from the flexibility that can come from technology called virtualization, plans to expand its management software Monday to let Java programs run on servers more efficiently.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company sells software called Cassatt Collage that governs how software applications run on a pool of servers. A new option called the Web Automation Module extends to software running on Java application servers.

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Bill Coleman has some experience starting companies. After all, he is the "B" in BEA Systems, a middleware maker who made a killing in the application server space throughout the 90s.

During Coleman's tenure as BEA's first CEO, the company became the fastest software firm ever to top $1 billion in annual revenue.

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Bill Coleman has a simple answer for the complexity facing today’s CIO. Instead of thinking about virtualization, scale, mashup applications and rejiggering the hardware in the server room every evening, just think about two things: resources and policies applied to those resources. And while many people contend they have a simple answer to IT’s problems, Colman is worth listening to. He was the vice president of system software at sun, a founder and CEO of BEA Systems and he has attracted some top talent and big money at Cassatt Corp. where he intends to build a big business from his simple idea. I caught up with Bill on the phone this week. One of his contentions is that the Internet is enabling everyone to get into everyone’s business as in the telecoms, search engine companies and the movie studios all rushing towards a converged middle.

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Bill Coleman believes that the perfect storm in enterprise computing is on the horizon, in the form of the commoditization of computing. Coleman is the CEO of Cassatt, and a founder of BEA and former Sun executive. He has assembled one of the top pools of experienced industry talent to capitalize on commoditization, which rests on scale out, building block hardware and loosely coupled SOA software components. I wrote about Cassatt about a year ago, and its Collage product that automates management of Linux and Window environments.

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IDC has reported a whopping 62% growth in virtual machine software over the last year, according to this Network World article. The focus of the article is the intense amount of virtualization management solutions being released by the systems management vendors -- and how these vendors are going about the actual management of the virtual servers themselves.

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When it came to technology, First National Bank of Nebraska Inc. (FINN ) had too much of a good thing. The holding company, with 21 banks and 110 branches in the Midwest, had loaded up on gear in the 1990s. It ran online-banking Web sites on 30 Unix servers and handled more than 500 internal applications on 560 small servers running Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) Windows. But since many of the machines handled just one application, the system was woefully inefficient. The bank's techies did the math and discovered that they were using only about 12% of their potential computing power. Senior Vice-President Ken Kucera decided to rip up and start over.

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If the new data center is to become intelligently self-healing and unquestionably reliable, trustworthy automation technologies had better begin to materialize. Enter start-up Cassatt, which aims to fill in the automation gap with products that perform real-time provisioning of IT resources. Over time, such automation will nudge hardware toward commoditization, which will lower the data center's total cost of ownership, predicts Bill Coleman, CEO of Cassatt, one of Network World's 10 start-ups to watch for 2004. Here Coleman shares his IT automation vision.

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Cassatt, a start-up whose software is designed to make collections of servers into a fluid, adaptable software foundation, plans to release the next version of its software on Tuesday.

Version 3 of Cassatt Collage will differ from its predecessor chiefly in its ability to control software running on a wide range of server types, not just on collections of similar machines, said Rich Green, executive vice president of product development.

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One question I'm asked fairly often is: What's the next killer app? The concept of the killer app has a powerful hold on our collective psychology. We want to believe that the entire market can be propelled forward by the next must-have technology that spawns a new generation of industry leaders and reshapes our lives. The spreadsheet, LANs, cell phones, e-mail, the Web and so on. Absent the next killer app, the market stagnates.

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Utility computing may be one of the hottest topics in the technology industry these days, but much work must be done before it will ever achieve widespread acceptance, said a panel of industry experts at an Open Source Development Labs Inc. event yesterday.
Panel members said that part of the problem is the term utility computing itself, which could be used to denote a wide variety of concepts. "If you ask 10 people what grid or utility computing is, you'll get 14 or 15 answers from them," said Rob Gingell, chief technology officer at software vendor Cassatt Corp. In reality, utility computing is "not so much a thing as it is a confluence of various trends," he said.

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As Linux running on x86 servers continues to grow in corporate data centers, questions remain as to whether the open-source operating system introduces a higher level of management complexity than the proprietary Unix systems it replaces.

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Anybody who is the least bit worried that innovation has somehow died in IT need look no further than the virtualization space.

As an industry, we've been talking about virtualization in earnest for the last few years, mostly as a tool to gain greater hardware efficiency, and most notably in the form of the tools provided by VMware, a unit of EMC, that allow multiple operating systems to run on a single machine.

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Three years ago, it sounded as though William Coleman was planning on kicking back and enjoying his retirement. The co-founder of Internet software maker BEA Systems (BEAS ) had plans to spend time with his wife, do some skiing near his second home in Aspen, Colo., and work on fund-raising for the Coleman Center, a research organization at the University of Colorado specializing in applying computers to help people with cognitive disabilities. The center was named after the 57-year-old Coleman, who promised to donate $200 million to get the program off the ground.

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Cassatt Corp. will introduce software this spring that will let agencies pool the processing power of their servers to run complex applications, according to a recent company announcement.

“We’re working on IT operations automation,” said Mark Forman, executive vice president of the San Jose, Calif.-based company. By pooling processing power and other server-based resources, agencies can reduce personnel costs, use their equipment better and make their systems more agile, he said.

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Data center automation startup Cassatt says it will ship Version 3.0 of its Collage management product in the first quarter of 2005. The upcoming release will enable Collage to manage multiple tiered applications and will add support for Windows servers.

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Closely watched start-up Cassatt is joining the ranks of IT providers convinced that corporate computing is too expensive.

The company on Monday is expected to disclose its product plans and reveal the names of initial software partners that intend to support the Cassatt software. The company was started by BEA Systems co-founder Bill Coleman, who is now Cassatt's chairman and CEO.

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