Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » TAG: Cassatt

May 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Cassatt links server-power management with real-time demands

TAGS: Cassatt

Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the high costs of maintaining and cooling servers: A mid-tier $2,500 server can cost as much as $2,020 to power and cool annually, according to the Uptime Institute. Thus, demand for ways to curb those expenses is rising as well.

Strategies such as server consolidation and virtualization are gaining momentum as a means of reducing server head count. Once you're down to as few servers as you need to meet peak demands, however, there are still inevitably times when you're wasting substantial energy powering idle machines that are waiting for something to do.

That's the case being made by Cassatt, a relatively young company based in San Jose, Calif., as it pushes its Active Response offering. The software tool is designed to help admins make more efficient use of their datacenter resources -- and it's a big step toward on-demand or utility computing, in fact.

With the new Version 5.1 release of Active Response, Cassatt has added a very enticing capability: Admins can now set up policies such that application resources -- physical or virtual servers, software, and network resources -- will automatically adjust to meet real-time demand or service levels. The idea, in a nutshell, is to have just enough servers running simultaneously to satisfy users' needs, thus saving money on keeping excess servers from needlessly drawing expensive energy and cooling.

To understand the possibilities here, let's consider a scenario where your company has, say, 500 Web servers dedicated to selling widgets. A couple times a month when widgets are on sale, demand shoots up and the servers reach 85 percent utilization. Most of the time, it's more like 50 percent. After hours and on weekends, though, it drops down to 15 percent. (These numbers are purely hypothetical, given the difficult to track widget demand in today's tough economy).

The problem here is, even when the servers are at 50 percent or 15 percent utilization, they're drawing energy all the time. Research has found that servers burn more than half of their rated power while idling — which in turn amps up the need for additional cooling, burning further power. Now you might view keeping all those machines powered on all the time as insurance that you can meet service demand if it suddenly shoots up unexpectedly. But given the rising costs of energy, it's an expensive premium you're paying.

With Version 5.1 of Cassatt's Active Response, an admin could create policies to power on physical servers and create virtual ones one the fly, only as demand dictates -- and to power them down when demand drops. For example, you might set policies such that when your first 20 servers reach 60 percent utilization, another 10 will turn on. When those 30 hit 60, another 10 will turn on, and so on. When utilization drops to whatever level you choose, you set the machines to power down accordingly.

Savings here can be substantial: If you've got 500 200W servers, your energy rate is ten cents per kWh (the U.S. average), and you can power down machines just 25 percent of the time, you can save nearly $50,000 per year on power and cooling expenses. Those savings scale depending on how many servers you have -- as well as how high energy costs soar.

Demand-based policies are just part of the Cassatt package. Admins can also create time-based policies, useful if you have predictable demands for your servers. For example, if you have servers setting aside for testing and development that are used from 9 to 6 on weekdays and never on weekends, you could set up policies to power the machines down at the end of the day and back on before employees show up for work. (Sounds a lot like PC power management, no?)

Notably, the demand-based policy could complement the time-based policies: You could have a couple of test servers fire up at 9:00 so developers could get to work straight away, then have more turn on as need increases -- and power down when demands decrease.

In addition to the time- and demand-based policies, you can create them based on specific events or required capacity to power machines.

Also with the release of Version 5.1, Cassatt has made Active Response compatible with third-party tools such as systems management applications, load balancers, and trouble ticket systems. This, too, creates intriguing opportunities: "Take the example of using an F5 load balancer in an environment with dynamic repurposing. As new servers are provisioned, Active Response can communicate in real-time to the balancer and provide the new VIPs in seconds as the servers are brought online," writes Ken Oestrich, director of product management at Cassatt.

This new version of Cassatt Active Response really is intriguing, equipping admins with a whole new level of control over datacenter resources. It makes the vision of dynamic server farms -- where workloads automatically adjust and shift between entire datacenters -- seem all the more plausible.

Posted by Ted Samson on May 22, 2008 03:00 AM

November 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Cassatt unveils Active Reponse suite for cutting datacenter energy waste

TAGS: Cassatt, Energy conservation, Power consumption, Waste reduction

Company says app-aware, platform-agnostic software intelligently powers servers off and on as needed

With backing from big-name IT companies such as Sun, Citrix, and Red Hat, Cassatt today unveiled its Active Response 5.0 software suite, capable of actively powering servers on and off as needed and pooling physical and virtual server resources to reduce datacenter energy waste by as much as 50 percent, according to the company.

Combining Cassatt Active Power Management and utility computing technologies based on Cassatt Collage, Active Response is designed to rein in the amount of power wasted by servers that often sit idle for long periods until they are needed. Those include machines in development and test centers, scale-out production environments, failover, and disaster recovery sites.

Specifically, Active Response employs a policy engine that, according to Cassatt, powers servers up and down on an as-needed basis, "[taking] into account server priorities and needs, server interrelationships, application dependencies and relationships, and individual server power consumption."

The software also takes into account variables such as peak and off-peak power schedules, time of day, and emergencies such as "demand curtailment" mandates from power companies to reduce electrical consumption.

Admins also can set policies to ensure server resources are available to meet service level agreements for application delivery.

The company says the system is application aware, knowing when and how apps must be shut down and brought back up. Further, it's aware of application interdependencies shared across multiple servers, Cassatt reports.

The company says the suite will run on any platform and works with any virtual or physical server , (including blade servers). Changes to existing hardware and software configs aren't necessary, either.

All told, there will be four editions of the Active Reponse suite: Standard, Premium, Data Center, and Enterprise. Especially interesting to me is the Enterprise Edition, slated for release in next year. The company says it will enable an organization to share and optimize its resources across multiple data centers in different geographies.

"Pooling your IT resources and then using software to intelligently and actively control them can create a real shift in the economics of running a datacenter," said Michelle Bailey, research vice president for IDC, in a written statement. "With products like Cassatt Active Response, customers can start to see the type of energy efficiency, application availability, and datacenter responsiveness that previously were only possible by having much higher levels of infrastructure and operations investment."

Cassatt, launched in 2003 and based in San Jose, Calif., has announced a fairly impressive array of supporters for its technology, including Sun, Citrix, Red Hat, and BearingPoint.

"We view green initiatives that promise to reduce energy with minimal resources as a win-win for everyone, and as a platform with the potential to transform the data center," said Frederic Veron, managing director, financial services infrastructure solutions at BearingPoint, in a written statement. "We are very pleased to be working with Cassatt on Active Power Management solutions that will enable our clients' data centers to intelligently power up or down in synch with business cycles and demand."

Cassatt Active Response 5.0 will ultimately be available in four editions. Standard Edition, out on Nov. 16, starts at $200 per managed machine. The Premium Edition, available today, starts at $1,250 per managed machine. The Data Center Edition, also available today, starts at $2,500 per managed machine. Finally, the Enterprise Edition will be available in the second half of 2008.

Posted by Ted Samson on November 5, 2007 12:45 PM