Cassatt helps organizations implement in-house clouds

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.

Here's how Cassatt describes their offerings

The Cassatt software and services announced today provide organizations initial, practical steps toward realizing the benefits of cloud computing.

• The new Cassatt Active Profiling Service gives companies a head start on establishing internal clouds by tackling one of the major problems facing corporate IT – a lack of information and understanding about the assets, interrelationships, and dynamic, real-time usage patterns within data centers.
• Then, through the broadened control capabilities of Cassatt Active Response 5.2, Cassatt can help customers improve energy efficiency, application availability, and enable the best use of computing resources – across the diverse hardware, software, and virtualization technologies already running in a data center.

More details from the announcement

Cassatt Active Profiling Service:  What Is in Your Data Center?  What Is It Doing?

The new Cassatt Active Profiling Service gathers information about servers and their configurations, server usage patterns, utilization, energy consumption, server interdependencies, and other key details.  Then, Cassatt experts analyze the data to help companies make the best decisions on ways to improve data center efficiency and operations – including recommendations such as finding "orphan" or unused servers, identifying candidate servers for virtualization and consolidation, suggesting policies to save on data center energy costs, and mapping out the steps to move toward an internal cloud-style IT infrastructure that could provide utility-style computing.

Example recommendations could include using active power management technology to curb energy waste from idle servers; automating failover to provide improved application availability, regardless of platform; implementing dynamic resource repurposing to make better use of every server while preserving availability and service levels; or coupling policy-based management with resource repurposing, allowing data center infrastructure to respond quickly to changes in business demand.

Cassatt Active Response 5.2:  Dynamic Control across Diverse Environments

Cassatt also announced today broadened operating-system, virtualization, and networking support in its flagship product, Cassatt Active Response 5.2. This latest revision extends Cassatt's existing, broad operating system, virtualization, and networking support to include the IBM AIX operating system and Force10 network switches, with forthcoming support for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers OS-level server virtualization solutions.  Because of its broad support of the heterogeneous technologies in use in today's data centers, Cassatt Active Response 5.2 provides a practical way to improve real-world data center efficiency by controlling infrastructure based upon policies, while delivering the service levels required for important applications.

Cassatt Active Response enables data center managers to use policies to control and optimize the multiple diverse components of their IT infrastructure.  Cassatt Active Response can monitor and automatically provision or decommission physical and virtual server, software, and network resources as appropriate to meet the application demand.

This means that with Cassatt Active Response customers can break down the static silos of hardware and software that sit mostly idle in data centers today, over-provisioned in anticipation of the largest expected spikes in demand.  Instead, customers can pool their hardware and software into a cloud of computing resources shared across applications, and use only the amount of computing capacity needed at any one time.  This approach frees up previously unusable compute capacity, increases control, and can reduce traditional IT operations costs for data centers by as much as 50 percent, fundamentally altering the calculations for what could or should be outsourced.

Snapshot analysis

Of the competitors in the orchestration and automation segment of the overall virtualization technology market, Cassatt is one of the few that clearly understand today's datacenters are made up of a complex mix of technology and have progressively extended the reach of its products to optimize and manage more and more of that environment.

Although suppliers, such as VMware are speaking about creating an operating system for the datacenter, they're still focused solely on the industry standard systems. Cassatt, on the other hand, knows that tools that are only capable of dealing with the industry standard systems in the datacenter are ignoring the largest part of the problem datacenter managers face today.

If your organization is considering the implementation of an in-house cloud as a way to make better use of the available resources, it would be worth a few minutes to look into what Cassatt is doing.