Cassatt(R) Corporation, a leader in innovative solutions to improve resource, operational, and energy efficiencies in the data center, today announced a breakthrough technology that safely and intelligently powers servers off when they are not needed or idle.  This technology is the cornerstone of Cassatt's new strategy for helping customers move toward greener data centers.

Controlled by polices set by administrators and optimized automatically, Cassatt Active Power Management(TM) technology continually optimizes power consumption based on the time of day, demand, curtailments imposed by power companies, or other facilities-based events.  In early tests with Active Power Management, customers have experienced up to 50 percent reduction in their power usage, simply by allowing Active Power Management to turn off servers when idle, and then confirm a successful power-up when they are  needed again.

"Technologies like Cassatt Active Power Management are changing the way data center managers can address power and cooling problems," said Michelle Bailey, research vice president for IDC.  "How big of a problem is this?  Our most recent survey puts power and cooling as the number one issue in data centers today.  Servers are typically kept on 24 by 7, leading to an enormous waste of power and cooling resources.  Cassatt's innovations in this space not only offer customers a solution for reducing IT operations costs, but also help bridge the gap between facilities and IT."

Rising Imperative to "Go Green" in the Data Center

Electricity and cooling costs for large data centers -- the corporate facilities that house hundreds or thousands of computer servers as well as storage equipment and networking gear -- are outstripping all other operational and equipment costs, chiefly because servers are powered on 24 hours a day, whether or not they are being used.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported last month that data centers are consuming up to 1.5 percent of all the electricity generated in the U.S.

"The energy use associated with the nation's servers and data centers has grown significantly over the period from 2000 to 2006," according to the EPA report.  "This electricity use has more than doubled since 2000 and amounts to about $4.1 billion in electricity costs.  It is more than the electricity consumed by the nation's color televisions and similar to the amount of electricity used by the entire U.S transportation manufacturing industry, which includes the manufacture of automobiles, aircraft, trucks, and ships."

A principal reason for the heavy power usage is that data centers usually are stocked with servers that can handle the highest imaginable level of peak demand by computer users but are severely underutilized most of the time. Studies by American Power Conversion Corp. have shown that servers consume as much as 55 percent of their fully-loaded power when they sit idle.

"Cassatt is in an ideal position to help customers reduce energy consumption in their data centers," said Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt.  "Our expertise and experience in utility computing and data center automation give us the depth and breadth to tackle this problem in a way that's easy, affordable, and non-invasive.  Data centers have been big energy wasters because they operate on a one-application-per-server principle to ensure 100 percent uptime during peak usage, resulting in massively over-provisioned systems constantly running at full power even when they are  not needed.  Now customers can have 100 percent uptime -- and cut their energy costs nearly in half."

PG&E Comments on Cassatt Active Power Management

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), the electrical utility for Northern California, has developed an industry-leading program for data centers, focusing on both energy efficiency and demand response programs to cut usage during critical periods.

"We have been intently watching the development of technology like Cassatt's Active Power Management that can actively and safely match computing equipment run time with varying IT workloads," according to Mark Bramfitt, principal program manager for the high tech market segment at PG&E.  "We know that many data centers operate at very low capacity rates, so the potential for energy savings is high - and the potential to shift IT workloads into off-peak hours is especially intriguing."

Active Power Management:  Best Practices Applied Intelligently and Elegntly

Cassatt Active Power Management technology is based on a sophisticated policy engine that takes into account server priorities and needs, server interrelationships, application dependencies and relationships, and individual server power consumption in deciding when to power-down machines. It 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 - for example, on hot summer weekdays. The technology determines which servers to power down, and for how long, and then safely handles application requirements before turning them off.  As servers are needed again, it applies the same logic and priorities to power those servers back on as appropriate.

What sets Cassatt Active Power Management apart from any other approach is the way in which it intelligently works with existing resources in the data center.   The technology is unique in that it 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 then 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
  
  

Cassatt Active Power Management technology does not require modification to hardware or software, nor does it require installing any additional software on managed servers. Rather, it leverages internal power controllers found on most modern servers or external power distribution units. This means the solution can be quickly installed in most data centers with minimum disruption to operations -- enabling energy and cost savings to accrue almost immediately.

Complementary to Virtualization and Consolidation Projects

The Cassatt Active Power Management approach is complementary to current data center energy efficiency strategies -- such as upgrading to more energy-efficient servers, improving HVAC efficiencies, smart power distribution systems, server consolidation, and virtualization.  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.

Because it is faster and easier to implement than existing strategies, Active Power Management is an ideal first move to take when striving to cut power consumption.  Cassatt's approach has been shown to provide as much as 50 percent additional savings on top of what customers would be getting with their existing efficiency plans.

Brocade, the leading provider of network storage-based solutions based in San Jose, Calif., is currently running a trial installation of the Cassatt software in its engineering labs.  "Energy efficiency in the data center is a high priority for Brocade.  It's important to our business and to the customers we serve," said Zahid Hussain, vice president of engineering for Brocade.  "To that end, Cassatt's Active Power Management approach is very compelling.  With thousands of active servers in our test and development labs alone, having the ability to set policies to automatically power them up and down as needed represents an opportunity for tremendous energy and cost savings for Brocade."

Product Roll-Out

The Cassatt Active Power Management technology will be available in an easy-to-adopt and easy-to-install line of products with feature sets that align with customers' strategies to run increasingly green data centers. Cassatt will announce more details about its green data center product line later this month.  The company is currently working on the products with early adopter customers, including Brocade.

Organizations Partnering With Cassatt

Cassatt developed this technology with input from the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Energy Efficient Data Center Demonstration Project.  The Leadership Group's Green IT project includes approximately 30 Silicon Valley end users, governmental organizations like Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Bay Area universities, and technology vendors working together to deliver examples of smart, energy-efficient data center computing equipment, operations, and supporting infrastructure.  "The Silicon Valley community is once again breaking new ground," said Ray Pfeifer, chair of the Leadership Group's data center demonstration project. "We are extraordinarily pleased to be working with Cassatt and facilitating innovation that reduces traditional data center power and cooling needs and the associated power generation GHG emissions in such a straightforward fashion."

Demonstrations at the BearingPoint-Cassatt Customer Experience Center in New York

Potential customers can see demonstrations of the Cassatt Active Power Management technology in action at the BearingPoint-Cassatt Customer Experience Center at 3 World Financial Center in New York.  The customer center, announced in May, replicates a large corporate data center and is aimed at financial services companies that want to design, incubate, and test ways to improve resource, operational, and energy efficiencies in their data centers.

Cassatt will also demonstrate Active Power Management at VMware's VMworld conference, Sept. 11-13, in booth 639 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.