Your IT department can realize dramatic cost savings by reducing the number of servers required, and their associated licenses, and still respond with agility to your company's evolving business needs.
Gartner Webcast: Server Consolidation and Virtualization for Java Applications

Why can't systems just consolidate themselves?

The Challenge:

Over-provisioning. Under-Utilized Servers. Static IT Infrastructures. Hard-to-Predict Capacity Planning.

With having to over-provision to handle the unpredictable nature of today's workloads, corporate data center assets sit idle on average nearly 90 percent of the time. If you're like most smart IT managers, you understand this issue and are considering server consolidation solutions that will allow you to achieve three goals: tap into the unused capacity of your existing systems, raise overall capital efficiency, and enable you to quickly respond to the changing needs of your business.

Why is utilization so low in the first place? The answer is related to the static nature of today's IT infrastructure and to the dynamic nature of application demand. First, most applications are tightly coupled software and hardware stacks - sometimes tediously assembled - and therefore treated as relatively static. Second, hardware is usually sized for worst-case demand, which may actually never even occur. And finally, if IT can accurately analyze current capacity needs the "snapshot" is static, meaning it could be obsolete just one week later. The result: rampant over-provisioning and inefficient capital use.

The Solution:

Cassatt Active Response - A Real-time Infrastructure for Real-time Utilization Management.

With Cassatt Active Response, you can realize dramatic cost savings in the data center by reducing the number of servers required, and still respond with agility to your company's evolving business needs. Cassatt Active Response manages physical and virtual machines while, at the same time, enabling them to be dynamically allocated to an ever-changing workload.

Virtualize, Allocate, Automate

The popular route to server consolidation is to host multiple applications on a single server. In effect, this means sharing the resources on a single physical device that hosts multiple virtual entities. This involves adding a layer to the system such as a Virtual Machine Manager or Java Virtual Machine. Virtualization is a highly effective way to reduce the physical hardware requirements in a data center, however, it does little to address the costs of managing systems, where most IT costs lie. In fact, in most cases virtualization adds significant management overhead. Plus, by hosting multiple services on a single piece of hardware, the costs of physical hardware failure are dramatically increased.

Cassatt's software helps in both cases. First, it automates the creation, destruction, and management of virtual resources such as Virtual Machines, dramatically reducing operating costs. And second, it has automation capabilities that instantly add high availability characteristics to such systems and allow both virtual and physical failures to be corrected automatically.

Shift Your IT Resources in Minutes, Not Hours

Cassatt's technologies allow your servers to be quickly repurposed from one task to another in just minutes, whether the applications are virtualized or physical. On average, it takes only five minutes (the time required to reboot the system) to completely replace the operating system and applications on a server. This kind of agility allows for better data center management where physical resources are shared among different tasks.

Say Goodbye to "Static" Capacity Planning

Cassatt Active Response's rules-based automation engine continuously monitors application size, demand, infrastructure capacity and machine availability. When an application demand is high, that application will automatically receive the hardware resources it needs. When application demand is low, more applications are consolidated on fewer machines; In effect, consolidation happens dynamically, in real-time, increasing capital efficiency, and eliminating costly administrative time.

The Business Value:

A Single Solution that Consolidates Servers and Improves Service Level Management.

With Cassatt Active Response, you have a single solution that enables your IT department to right-size server resources under a unified operational control that results in:

  • Greater capital efficiency - regardless of demand
  • Reduced operational costs by providing simpler and more streamlined management
  • Improved responsiveness and capacity while optimizing server utilization
Cassatt Active Response allows your organization to say "goodbye" to over-provisioning and "no problem" to the business demands of the day— enabling you to always respond quickly and efficiently.

Go to the Cassatt Active Response product page for more details.