Google's Principal Engineer, Luiz Andre Barroso, predicts that if performance per watt remains constant over the next few years, Google's power costs could easily overtake the costs of its hardware by a large margin.

Source: The Price of Performance, From Multiprocessors. Volume 3, No. 7, September 2005 by Luiz Andre Barroso

White Paper: Active Power Management

Shouldn't the normal economies-of-scale also apply to computing?

The Challenge:

Increasing Server Power Consumption, Real Estate, and Administrative Costs.

Data center management costs have been spiraling out of control for many years. For example, the amount of electricity a typical data center uses increased 39% between 1999 and 2005 according to a recent Uptime Institute Study. In fact, operational costs are outpacing capital costs, and most leading analysts agree that operational costs now comprise the largest expense of maintaining a data center. A recent APC study estimated that the TCO of a rack's power equipment, cooling equipment and electricity accounted for 44% of operational costs in a data center over its lifetime.

Part of the reason why operational costs are increasing is that the complexity of IT systems within large data centers is growing, and with it, administrative costs outpace all others. Administrative costs now comprise the largest component of operational costs, and account for the largest portion of an IT budget. Forrester Research's 2006 IT spending survey revealed that 38% of IT budgets were dedicated to full-time staff.

But with thousands of servers running thousands of services, problem-solving and planning for the future have literally become too complex for humans. An automated approach to managing the complexity of today's rapidly evolving data centers is needed to control costs.

The Cassatt Solution:

Cassatt Active Response automates a continuous supply-demand balance by creating intelligent "capacity pooling" across diverse hardware platforms by automatically measuring, analyzing and responding to resource demands.

Cassatt Active Response is driven by a rules-based optimization engine, which means your IT staff does not have to work with scripts or schedulers. It intelligently allocates resources - whether physical or virtual - to the appropriate application, based on pre-defined rules and priorities. Cassatt Active Response, Data Center Edition provides a network virtualization control capability, where for example bare-metal resources can be shared across multiple virtual local-area networks (VLANs). The result is a pool of resources that can be intelligently shared to support the required application services.

Take an example of a data center with multiple VLANs, diverse hardware platforms, and "siloed" applications with loads that change with time. Operational costs originate from the need for specialized administrators to constantly adjust machine loads, roll-out patches, and adjust network allocations; other operational costs result from power consumption and space.

Using Cassatt Active Response, most of the load adjustment, patch management and networking adjustment - across all platforms - is automated, vastly improving administration efficiency. Further, Cassatt Active Response can be given rules to continuously optimize machine loads and CPU utilization, resulting in "real-time" consolidation - saving considerable power and real estate costs, as well.

The Business Value:

If the majority of IT costs originate from operational rather than capital sources, then why are all current "consolidation" solutions focused on saving capital costs?

At Cassatt, we have intentionally developed technology that alleviates the day-to-day operational cost burdens, and that increases overall data center management efficiency.