Take Four Cassatt's Active Response 5.1

In honor of the demo goddess, my chat with the good folks of Cassatt was rescheduled four times. They had to reschedule. I had to reschedule. A fire alarm forced a reschedule. Finally, on the forth try, we connected and I was able to see a most impressive demo of Cassatt's recently announced Active Response 5.1. It was worth the wait. I saw the product turn on an off computing resources based upon workload limits and polices. Organizations could most certainly see savings based upon proper utilization of equipment, reduction in administrative staff time and, increasingly important, reductions in power utilizaiton and heat production.

Who is Cassatt?

I've been following Cassatt for quite some time. (They noticed and began to take evasive maneuvers, but they haven't gotten away from me yet.) They've been working hard to create "a datacenter operating system" that has the ability to monitor and control IT resources throughout the organization's datacenter based upon policies, service level objectives and, most recently, on power consumption.

What is Active Response?

Here's how the company describes Active Response:

The Cassatt Active Response product line, with four editions that meet the needs of organizations of every size and complexity, is based on patent-pending Active Power Management technology that pools physical and virtual server resources for the most efficient utilization, and uses policy-driven controls to safely, intelligently, and systematically power servers off when not needed, and on when they are.

Unlike passive power management point products, Cassatt Active Response products are uniquely:

• Policy-Based— Easily create and schedule policies to actively power servers on and off based on time, demand, emergency curtailments, and operational requirements.
• Application-Aware— Cassatt technology understands application inter-dependencies shared across servers and knows when and how to power apps off and on with zero impact to users.
• Hardware-and Software-Independent— Runs on any platform, requiring no change to existing physical or virtual hardware and software, including power distribution/UPS equipment.

Sound like a totally buzz-word complient description? Well, yes it is. Active Response appears to fullfill all of the promises made by Cassatt.

Different Editions, Different Needs

Although Active Response appears to be a very comprehensive, powerful product, Cassatt has devised a way to deliver capabilities to organizations based upon their requirements. Those with fairly modest requirements can purchase Active Response Standard. As organizational needs increae or as the organization wants to more fully automate the datacenter, Active Response can be purchased in a Premium Edition, a Data Center Edition and an Enterprise Edition. Here's was each edition does:

• Active Response Standard Edition - manage power and assure policy compliance
• Active Response Premimum Edition - manage power, assure policy compliance, manage images, increase application resilience, repurpose servers as needed, manage virtual machines and manage hybrid virtual/physical environmetnts.
• Active Repsonse Data Center Edition - manage power, assure policy compliance, manage images, increase application resilience, repurpose servers as needed, manage virtual machines, manage hybrid virtual/physical environmetnts, manage networks and create high availability environments
• Active Repsonse Enterprise Edition - manage power, assure policy compliance, manage images, increase application resilience, repurpose servers as needed, manage virtual machines, manage hybrid virtual/physical environmetnts, manage networks, create high availability environments, increase span of control, make the datacenter more autonomic and offer enhanced policy management tools

After seeing this list, I suggested that they offer an Active Response Coffee Shop Edition that would also make sure that the coffee pots were turned off when all of the coffee was gone. Jay Fry, VP of marketing for Cassatt, told me that they'd take that idea under advisement. I doubt, however, that they'll do anything with it.

If your organization is considering how to make the datacenter more efficient, more reliable, and "green," it would be good to schedule a demo to see this product in action.