Cassatt Corporation announced new service and technology offerings to help companies safely realize "internal cloud computing" -- an IT approach that delivers the benefits of cloud computing using the resources that organizations already have inside their data centers.

"Cloud computing offers great promise by having third parties deliver the computing resources needed to run applications as an on-demand service, with a lot of the IT infrastructure invisible to the user," said Bill Coleman , chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp. "However, at this point most IT professionals are not comfortable outsourcing the mission-critical parts of their sensitive internal applications to an external cloud provider. They are concerned about availability, vendor lock-in, not having the control they need, and having to rebuild these applications from scratch with proprietary tools running on provider-specific platforms."

To directly address these problems, the updated Cassatt offerings leverage Cassatt's extensive data center expertise and technology to help customers implement cloud-style computing environments using their existing systems, inside the firewalls of their data centers without having to modify their current hardware or software. The resulting "internal cloud" can provide the same operational efficiency, fault tolerance, and energy savings promised by external clouds, but without the worries over security, compliance, lack of control, or the need or delay required to change or replace their current applications.

Practical First Steps to Creating a Cloud-Style Infrastructure

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.

"Cassatt gives organizations the ability to run their data centers like Amazon or Google, but using the IT infrastructure they already have in-house," said Coleman. "We think internal cloud computing is the key to data center efficiency. And, because of that, internal clouds can't be limited to only one type of virtualization or operating system. With Cassatt, customers can control and optimize the many types of hardware, operating systems, virtualization, and network resources that they already have -- and they can start today."

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.

IDC, IBM, Parallels, and Force10 Networks Comment on Cassatt's Announcement
"As organizations become aware of the potential cost benefits and flexibility associated with cloud computing, they are going to look for ways to get these same benefits in their internal data centers," said Al Gillen , program vice president, system software at IDC. "Cassatt recognized the benefit of building a management system that could deliver services using a cloud-like paradigm long before the term 'cloud' was in everyday use. Cassatt continues to expand its support for the hardware, software, virtualization, and networking resources that customers use in their data centers today."

"We are pleased that the combination of IBM AIX systems, with the latest version of Cassatt Active Response, will result in further energy efficiency in the data center," said Jay Kruemcke , AIX offering manager, IBM Systems and Technology Group. "Through the application of utility computing principles including resource repurposing and power management, the AIX platform can be one of the most power-efficient compute platforms on the market today."

"We are thrilled to see Cassatt support Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, the world's leading OS virtualization solution, which provides the highest levels of density and performance of any server virtualization product," said Bryan Goode , vice president of business development, Parallels. "Cassatt Active Response software will provide an ideal platform for dynamically and automatically managing a mixed environment of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers as well as physical servers, giving customers a way to run their applications with an extremely cost-effective and adaptable infrastructure."

"With Cassatt's newly added support of Force10 Networks data center switching solutions, customers can automatically optimize the configuration of network infrastructure, guaranteeing the quality of service and bandwidth required by applications, based on policies they set, to deliver cloud-style optimization and agility," said Steve Garrison , vice president of marketing, Force10 Networks. "Customers can save on space, power, cooling, and cabling, while using our agile, robust switch infrastructure to provide the best network configuration to support their business needs at any given time."

With the newly announced capabilities, Cassatt Active Response 5.2 now provides:

* Platform support for Linux, Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and IBM AIX.

* Support for virtualization from VMware, Citrix (Xen), with Parallels Virtuozzo Containers coming in the first quarter of 2009. Microsoft Hyper-V will be supported as customer demand warrants.

* Networking support for equipment from Cisco, Dell, Extreme Networks, Nortel Networks, F5, and Force10 Networks.