Cassatt’s Power Management Offers the Color Green

Cassatt Corporation announced one of its new technology offerings that allow datacenter managers to safely and intelligently power servers off and on as needed to help move toward a greener datacenter.

Cassatt’s Active Power Management technology is controlled by policies set by administrators and optimized automatically. It continually optimizes power consumption based on the time of day, demand, curtailments imposed by power companies, or other facilities-based events. And the company said that early tests have shown that customers are experiencing up to 50 percent reduction in their power usage by allowing Active Power Management to turn servers off when idle and then on again when needed.

Active Power Management intelligently works with existing resources in the data center and applies best-practice principles that are:

• Policy-Based – Administrators can apply appropriate business policies and priorities in order to determine when, where, and how to shut down idle servers, rather than leave them running 24 by 7 or relying on “hard-wired” power decisions. Polices can then be applied to safely and successfully power servers back on and confirm a successful start up

• Application Aware – Knows when and how applications can be systematically shut down and brought back up gracefully, and is aware of application interdependencies shared across multiple servers

• Hardware and Software Independent – Runs on any platform, requires no change to existing hardware and software configurations, and is compatible with existing power distribution/UPS equipment

In a typical datacenter, the cost of electricity and cooling are for the most part rising at a much faster rate than a datacenter’s operational or equipment costs. Studies by American Power Conversion (APC) have shown that servers are consuming as much as 55 percent of their fully loaded power when they just sit idle. And lately, EPA reports have come out that state datacenter power consumption can be reduced by simply shutting down idle servers or putting them into sleep mode.

That’s fine for underutilized physical servers, but what about virtual machines and their host servers?

Cassatt said the product also works with virtualization and datacenter consolidation projects. They continued by saying that organizations making use of virtualization will be able to gain not only the benefits of using fewer servers, but with Active Power Management they will be able to extend those benefits to all power management scenarios across all virtual and physical facilities.

I can definitely see this technology helping out with underutilized servers in a datacenter. Later this month, they should be coming out with more information on this product, and they are rolling the product out at select sites such as with early adopter Brocade. The company is planning to show off the technology at VMworld, so if you are interested in seeing it first hand to see how it can help your virtualized datacenter, this might be a great place to do just that.