CASSATT ACTIVE RESPONSE, DATA CENTER EDITION

For increased energy efficiency, high application availability, and server workload management in production environments.

Product Overview

Cassatt Active Response, Data Center Edition improves energy efficiency and delivers the high application availability required for enterprise production environments within a single data center running hundreds or thousands of servers tasked with delivering applications across multiple networks.

Cassatt Active Response, Data Center Edition enables administrators to control multiple networks, as well as to set policies to safely, intelligently, and systematically power any physical or virtual servers on and off and pool their computing resources. Pooling resources increases the availability of applications—independent of their origin—and allows applications to be delivered on demand where and when they are needed most at a fraction of the current cost. Cassatt Active Response can create and manage multiple networks— providing additional security and isolation of production applications from different users (e.g., HR, Sales, Finance, Dev, QA). This is needed for applications that are sensitive to network traffic or applications that manage sensitive data.

Data Center Edition also adds important redundancy to the management capabilities of Cassatt Active Response. This redundancy is in all management and control paths in addition to the redundancy in data paths, which provides a highly available environment for mission-critical, production applications. Cassatt Active Response, Data Center Edition radically improves utilization of existing data center resources and can mitigate the need to build new data centers.

By pooling resources, companies use their physical and virtual servers much more efficiently, improve the availability of applications, and reduce their dependence on costly redundant systems that run hot 24x7. For companies that have already invested in redundant systems for disaster recovery, Cassatt Active Response allows those systems to stay powered off until they are needed. Active Power Management means servers remain off (and cold) until needed, significantly reducing the costs to cool them and nearly doubling their potential lifespan. In addition, when Cassatt Active Response turns additional systems on to add them to the pool of available resources, it uses ActiveImaging to run the application images from the primary servers on the new servers, eliminating the need for duplicate license and maintenance fees for those backup systems. The result: data centers are more responsive and energy efficient. In fact, Cassatt Active Response is proven to cut server power and cooling costs by as much as 50 percent.

Fine-Grained Control of Multiple Networks

Cassatt Active Response, Data Center Edition adds additional capability to create and manage networks to isolate applications for improved security. For example, if finance and engineering teams must be assured that the computational tasks they perform do not interfere with each other or the rest of the organization, Data Center Edition isolates and manages the resources for those two teams on separate networks to ensure maximum security, performance, and reliability. This also provides an additional layer of security so sensitive data is not available to other applications or users. However, where policy allows, Data Center Edition can allow you to share server resources across networks, reducing the amount of wasted hardware and software, currently dedicated to only a single application.

Innovative, Patent-Pending Technology

Cassatt Active Response combines Cassatt's Active Power Management™ and utility computing technologies into a single product that makes it safe to turn servers off and on while meeting service level agreements and improving IT responsiveness throughout your business.

The innovative, patent-pending Cassatt Active Power Management technology enables automatic discovery of all physical and virtual servers in the data center, and uses a sophisticated policy engine that takes into account server priorities and needs, application dependencies and inter-relationships and individual server power consumption.

With this information, Active Power Management automatically determines which servers to power down, for how long, and then safely handles application requirements before turning them back on as application demand warrants. As servers are needed again—or, as failover systems are needed to expand the pool of available resources to meet service level agreements for application delivery—the technology actively applies the same logic and priorities to power those servers back on as appropriate.

• Policy-Based— Business conditions aren't hard-wired, and either is determination of when servers need to be used. Cassatt Active Response software leverages policies based on any combination of time, external events, compute capacity, or server demand-to deliver a completely flexible approach to controlling resource efficiency.
• Application-Aware— Understands application inter-dependencies shared across multiple servers and knows when and how applications must be systematically powered off and brought back on with no impact to users.
• Hardware-and Software-Independent— Runs on any platform, requires no change to existing hardware and software configurations including virtual machines, and is compatible with existing power distribution/UPS equipment.

Cassatt Active Response, Data Center Edition is a solution for power management, application availability, and server workload management that is also your first step toward a greener—and more efficient—data center.

Product Features and Capabilities

• Demand-based resource management policies
• Capacity-based resource management polices
• Event-based resource management policies
• Time-based resource management policies
• Automatically power physical servers on and off
• Power-conscious standby infrastructure
• Power off servers with low-priority applications during power emergencies
• Graceful IT curtailment/shutdown during unplanned environmental conditions
• Manage servers without capturing application images
• Power servers on/off by using a managed PDU
• Manage service levels (min, max, target capacity) on a group of servers (tier)
• Shut down servers containing sensitive information when they are not needed
• Facilities overrides for power-management policies
• Optimize and prioritize application service in power-limited facilities
• Gain greater insight into power usage patterns for different areas in your business
• Integration points for 3rd-party infrastructure management products

• Pool servers and VMs
• Capture application images for servers
• Provision O/S and applications on server from image library
• Deploy new versions of application images to managed environment (rolling upgrade)
• Application resiliency: replace failed server (physical or virtual)
• Repurpose server: install new O/S and application image
• Provision Virtual Machine Hypervisors (VMware and Xen)
• Manage VMs
• Provision O/S and applications to VM
• Manage service levels on heterogeneous environments with physical servers and VMs
• Mixed mode: power-managed servers and image-managed servers

• Manage switches (layer-2) and routers (layer-3)
  Data Center Edition can program switches and routers from various manufacturers (Cisco, Dell, Extreme, and Nortel) automatically. There is no need to learn the individual command sets and interfaces from each manufacturer.
• Create subnets and VLANs
  Applications can be deployed in a multi-tier network topology without manual setup by a network administrator.
• Manage servers on non-flat networks
  Different network segments are a fact of life in production data centers. Manage the entire data center in a location.
• Assign physical servers to networks
  Automatically deploy applications with all of their requirements—software, hardware, and networking.
• Assign VMs to networks
  Provide first-class networking support to all applications, whether they run on a physical server or in a VM.
• Second control node for High Availability
  Provides the highest levels of HA, with no single point of failure and fully redundant control and data paths in the environment.
• Image Matrix on shared storage
  Enables Disaster Recover solutions using two Data Center Edition installations—one in the primary and one in the backup. The Image Matrix can be replicated in real-time, allowing failover to the DR site in minutes rather than days.