Seems like there's always pressure on IT to reduce expenses and increase utilization. Of course, that's the sweet spot for Cassatt Collage. One of the simplest ways Collage can help reduce expenses is to reduce the amount of power you use in the data center.

The cost of electricity to keep servers running is enormous. You might have heard the industry buzz about how Google worries that the cost to power their servers is about to exceed the purchase price of those servers—and I bet they spend a fair chunk o' change on hardware.

Did your mother ever tell you to turn off the lights to save electricity? That was probably everybody's first lesson in the cost of power. Collage applies that lesson from your childhood (without the nagging) to the data center.

With Cassatt Collage, when servers are idle (and customers tell us that they see as little as 10% of their server capacity being used and they experience peak demand only 25% of the time), Collage simply powers them off. Hey, mom would be proud! And your CFO might like the reduced electrical bill, too!

To get an idea of how much money we're talking about, I've put together a power-cost calculator you can use. It determines the number of kilowatt hours you use in your data center based on the number of servers, and figures the annual cost of electricity using an average rate from the U.S. Department of Energy. Take a look, and think about how much you might save by using Collage to automatically power off idle servers.