Cassatt Corporation, an emerging leader in software for automating the management of large, diverse data centers, today announced the availability of Cassatt Collage 4.0.  This version of Cassatt’s flagship product includes new virtual machine and network virtualization control capabilities, helping organizations use automation to radically simplify data center management.  Cassatt Collage allows IT departments to deliver applications at required service levels by automatically and dynamically allocating the needed computing resources as demand on applications ebbs and flows – dramatically increasing capital efficiency and administrator productivity while slashing operational costs and improving reliability. 

As part of this new release, the Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) module of Cassatt Collage becomes the first product to simultaneously support the automated management of VMware ESX 3.0, Xen 3.0, and XenSource XenEnterprise 3.0 virtual machines.  In addition, Cassatt Collage 4.0 uses its new Network Virtualization Service (NVS) to work with Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) environments to dynamically configure network switches, allowing resources to be pooled and shared across networks. 

These new capabilities expand the Cassatt software’s ability to assign a broad set of data center resources to meet service levels through user-defined policies and priorities.  With this release, Cassatt can pool and control physical servers, virtual servers, application servers, and network resources, a key enabler for enterprises to adopt a utility computing model.  Customers can begin using Cassatt’s products without disruption to their current IT systems – Cassatt requires no changes to existing software, hardware, systems management, or provisioning systems.   

“As IT organizations increasingly deploy virtualization in the data center, they are hoping to improve hardware utilization, lower costs, and become more responsive,” said John Humphreys, program director, Enterprise Virtualization Software for IDC. “But to fully realize these benefits, IT needs to consider management and automation capabilities that can control the diverse components supporting applications – physical and virtual servers, networking, and beyond.  This is where Cassatt is focusing:  helping organizations automate service levels across both virtualized and non-virtualized resources.”

“With the new capabilities in Collage 4.0, we see customers using this as the operations system for the enterprise data center,” said Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp.

Redefining How Enterprises Do Capacity Planning and Disaster Recovery
The new Collage Network Virtualization Service (NVS) allows the Collage optimization engine to automatically interface with network switches and assign multiple networks to a given application or server.  Automating the configuration of network resources improves reliability by eliminating error-prone and time-consuming manual operations on network hardware and enabling pooling of resources across network boundaries.  It also allows for applications on multiple networks to draw from a single free pool of resources, enabling dramatic increases in server utilization.  This capability allows servers to be “harvested” from other networks (such as systems previously dedicated to only test or development) to automatically respond to a disaster or peak load requirements.   

For example, a business may require peak financial computing resources at the end of a quarter, but could find that many IT resources are locked into silos on a separate network. Though the resources may reside in the same data center, they cannot be pooled or shared to balance resources, costing the company an opportunity to save hardware and other IT costs.

Collage will now allow pooling of physical and virtual resources residing outside such networked silos, making more efficient use of corporate IT capital while dramatically improving reliability and availability.  The Collage NVS capability can modify network switches to return resources to a “free” pool across network domains, re-allocate those resources into the desired domain, and then automatically provision them with whatever application is currently experiencing the high demand. 

“With these new network virtualization control capabilities, customers could pull resources from any of their VLANs to support their most critical, most in-demand applications dynamically,” said Coleman.  “Organizations can set up ‘follow the moon’ policies, running your applications wherever in your network you have extra capacity or where compute resources – or even electricity costs –  are the cheapest at any given moment.  By making use of an organization’s existing excess computing capacity, we are enabling a change in data center economics that can have a major impact on how enterprises do capacity planning and disaster recovery.”

The Collage NVS provides organizations with the capability to dynamically configure network switches from Cisco, Dell, Extreme Networks, Nortel Networks and others.  

Managing VMs from Multiple Vendors
Cassatt Collage 4.0 provides support for diverse virtual machine (VM) technology, simultaneously automating the allocation and management of VMs from multiple vendors including VMware ESX 3.0, XenSource XenEnterprise 3.0, and the open source Xen 3.0 technology. This unique ability allows Collage to manage a fully automated infrastructure including hardware, software, and network resources.  Recognizing that most data centers will require support for multiple VM technologies, Cassatt will support all major vendors’ VMs to allow customers a choice of VM technologies, investment protection, and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in.  This capability automates the management of both physical and virtual machines, including the ability to do real-time migration of applications from physical to virtual servers, from virtual to physical servers, or from one virtual server to another while improving reliability and utilization.

Delivering Service Level Automation to Enable Utility Computing
Cassatt Collage 4.0 uses Cassatt’s unique “service level automation” and priority-driven, rules-based automation to manage the existing hardware and software resources in complex data center environments.  With the Collage platform, users assign service level goals, priorities, and constraints to each application and application workflow in the data center.  Collage then deploys each application to the environment and continuously monitors the applications to ensure they are meeting desired service levels. When those application service levels are not being met, Collage automatically, without human intervention, takes action by allocating additional hardware or software resources, while accounting for application priority, global resource availability, and current demand.

Collage 4.0 also introduces several additional features, including:

• Enhanced node discovery. Collage can manage a subset of nodes within a larger network without firewall setup while auto-discovering and auto-managing other nodes within the data center. This enhanced manual node discovery mode enables Collage to be non-disruptive when automating data center management.

• Support for settling resource contention issues. Collage can dynamically allocate services to available “free pool” node capacity based on a combination of service priority and other service level measures. As with previous versions, Collage uses node allocation and “harvesting” to ensure that the highest priority application services are always available in periods of high demand.