Cassatt Active Response improves energy efficiency and availability for your entire, heterogeneous data center—including both virtual and physical servers.
Podcast - CTO Rob Gingell: Managing Virtualization in the Data Center

Shouldn't virtual machines be easier to manage than physical ones?

The Challenge:

Leveraging Virtualization without the Baggage

To increase flexibility and reduce server over-provisioning, enterprise data centers are adopting the use of virtual machine (VM) technology from vendors such as VMware, Xen and others.

While this approach makes economic sense in many situations, the addition of these VMs can also increase your IT complexity, administration costs, and risk.

The first example: Increased risk. When a physical server fails in a traditional application deployment, your business would typically lose a single application. But consider the consequences of a physical failure happening when the server is loaded with several virtual servers, each running different business applications.

Another example: Increased complexity. Data centers that have been consolidated may have as many VMs as they have applications, doubling the total number of objects to manage. Add to that the possibility that some applications will remain physical and others may be virtualized but on differing virtualization platforms. Managing this heterogeneous virtualized data center presents additional administration needs and costs.

The Cassatt Solution:

Automating the Management of Physical and Virtual Servers with Cassatt Active Response

Cassatt Active Response automates the management and failover of both physical and virtualized applications, regardless of technology, ensuring the full value of virtualization without the management overhead.

Should a virtual server crash, Cassatt Active Response can restart that server instantly, or automatically select an alternative physical server with spare capacity.

If a physical server crashes, Cassatt Active Response will automatically:

  • Quarantine the failed physical server
  • Identify a new physical server from a free pool of shared servers - or from a lower priority application
  • Create appropriate new virtual servers (i.e. either VMware or XenSource) to replace the failed virtual servers
  • Provision hardware with a new virtual server container image, which can be accomplished on bare metal in as little as 5 minutes
  • Deploy virtual servers, bringing them back online
Cassatt Active Response does all of this without human intervention, but in strict accordance with user-defined, service-level agreements, which can be fully configured and customized by your administrator using a simple browser-based interface. There is no scripting required.

The Business Value:

Getting Virtualization Under Control

With Cassatt Active Response, you can use virtual server technologies for your entire, heterogeneous data center. Cassatt Active Response gets virtualization under control by providing a single software solution for managing both physical and virtual servers. Combining Cassatt Active Response with virtual server solutions such as VMware actually optimizes virtual server deployments in your enterprise.

By leveraging Cassatt Active Response, IT can:

  • Take advantage of the server consolidation benefits of a virtual server solution, without suffering the operational nightmare of a physical server crash
  • Offer highly available virtual - and physical -- servers
  • Offer better, faster, more cost-effective, and reliable service levels
  • Reduce operational costs via data center automation
  • Enable resource sharing to meet demand and service level agreements