Cassatt Active Response
Premium Edition

For increased energy efficiency and application resiliency

Product Overview

Cassatt Active Response, Premium Edition is tailored specifically for use in computing environments that typically have one physical location, are on one physical network, and are operating a number of different applications and platforms, both physical and virtual. The product enables administrators to set policies to power physical and virtual servers safely on and off and pool their computing resources. Pooling resources increases the availability of applications - independent of their origin or platform - and allows applications to be delivered on-demand where and when they are needed most. By pooling resources, companies also use their physical and virtual servers much more efficiently. Cassatt Active Response allows back-up or scale-out systems to stay powered off until they are needed, significantly reducing the costs to cool them and nearly doubling their potential lifespan.

In addition, when Cassatt Active Response turns additional systems on to add them to the pool of available resources, it uses Active Imaging to run application images from the primiary servers on the new servers, eliminating the need for duplicate license and maintenance fees for those backup systems. With this combination of capabilities, Cassatt Active Response, Premium Edition is proven to cut server power and cooling costs by 50 percent while at the same time ensuring the availability of priority applications, especially those with cyclical, high-demand usage, such as order entry or batch processing, during high-demand periods. Cassatt Active Response, Premium Edition can provide "always-available" capability for priority applications at only 12 to 33 percent of typical HA costs.

Innovative, Patent-Pending Technology

Cassatt Active Response combines Cassatt's Active Power Management™ and utility computing technologies into a single product that makes it safe to turn servers off and on while meeting service level agreements and improving IT responsiveness throughout your business.

The innovative, patent-pending Cassatt Active Power Management technology enables automatic discovery of all physical and virtual servers in the data center, and uses a sophisticated policy engine that takes into account server priorities and needs, application dependencies and inter-relationships and individual server power consumption.

With this information, Active Power Management automatically determines which servers to power down, for how long, and then safely handles application requirements before turning them back on as application demand warrants. As servers are needed again-or, as failover systems are needed to expand the pool of available resources to meet service level agreements for application delivery-the technology actively applies the same logic and priorities to power those servers back on as appropriate.

• Policy-Based—Business conditions aren't hard-wired, and neither is determination of when servers need to be used. Cassatt Active Response software leverages policies based on any combination of time, external events, compute capacity, or server demand-to deliver a completely flexible approach to controlling resource efficiency.
• Application-Aware—Understands application inter-dependencies shared across multiple servers and knows when and how applications must be systematically powered off and brought back on with no impact to users.
• Hardware-and Software-Independent—Runs on any platform, requires no change to existing hardware and software configurations including virtual machines, and is compatible with existing power distribution/UPS equipment.

Cassatt Active Response, Premium Edition is a solution for application resiliency that is also your first step toward deliver a green - and more efficient - data center.

Product Features and Capabilities

• Demand-based resource management policies
• Capacity-based resource management policies
• Event-based resource management policies
• Time-based resource management policies
• Automatically power physical servers on and off
• Power-conscious standby infrastructure
• Power off servers with low-priority applications during power emergencies
• Graceful IT curtailment/shutdown during unplanned environmental conditions
• Manage servers without capturing application images
• Power servers on/off by using a managed PDU
• Manage service levels (min, max, target capacity) on a group of servers (tier)
• Shut down servers containing sensitive information when they are not needed
• Facilities overrides for power-management policies
• Optimize and prioritize application service in power-limited facilities
• Gain greater insight into power usage patterns for different areas in your business
• Integration points for 3rd-party infrastructure management products

• Pool servers and VMs
  Share existing servers among different application workloads, and deploy new applications on unused servers. By pooling these resources, companies use their physical and virtual servers much more efficiently, improve application availability, and reduce their dependence on costly redundant systems that run hot 24x7.
• Capture application images for servers
  Create qualified/reference application stacks that can be shared among different sites, and moved easily from test through staging and to deployment. To ensure cross-platform resiliency against server failure for all applications in the data center, Cassatt Active Response, Premium Edition uses Cassatt Active Imaging to “snapshot” every application, regardless of platform, including virtualized applications and their VMs. The entire set of hardware platforms, including spare servers, in the data center, is inventoried, manually or automatically using Cassatt Active Discovery. The Cassatt Active Response controller monitors the status of every native and virtual application. In the event of a failure, the controller first re-boots the application and platform. Should that fail, the controller re-purposes the image to a spare server and re-starts the application. This provides failure resiliency to any number of diverse applications.
• Provision O/S and applications on server from image library
  Easily scale-out a base application stack to a large number of servers. Create an application image only as it is needed, so that software licenses can be pooled to reduce license costs.
• Deploy new versions of application images to managed environment (rolling upgrade)
  Seamlessly roll out new versions of applications or patched versions of applications. Perform upgrades one server at a time without needed to take the application offline.
• Application resiliency: replace failed server (physical or virtual)
  Provide redundancy for all applications managed by Cassatt without the need for always-on backup systems. Reduce software licensing costs, since licenses aren't needed for standby/backup systems. The same license is reused for the replacement server. Reduce hardware costs, since you no longer need always-on redundant systems for your critical application-Cassatt will find a replacement only when needed.
• Repurpose server: install new O/S and application image
  Share a limited set of hardware resources (servers and VMs) among different applications with cyclical or time-based workload profiles. Schedule workload profiles on the existing hardware resources and vary the profile dynamically.
• Provision VM Host (VMware)
  Manage VMware environments.
• Manage VMs
  A single administrator can manage thousands of VMs by focusing on higher-level policies and business priorities-because Cassatt Active Response manages the mundane tasks.
• Provision O/S and applications to VM
  Manage applications running on physical servers and VMs in exactly the same manner with a single piece of management software
• Manage service levels on heterogeneous environments with physical servers and VMs
  The same Linux application stack can be deployed to a physical machine or a virtual machine. There's no need to create special VM packaging (i.e., VMDK) of Linux applications. Linux applications can be deployed to VMs initially and then moved to physical machines later if performance becomes an issue.
• Mixed mode: power-managed servers and image-managed servers
  Start quickly by managing power in parts of your environment (e.g., engineering labs or low-priority applications). Gradually introduce pooling of resources and image management as you become comfortable with the Cassatt Active Power Management technology.