September 5, 2007—Cassatt Corporation, a leader in solutions to improve resource, operational, and energy efficiencies in the data center, has announced a breakthrough technology that safely and intelligently powers servers off when they are not needed or idle, according to the company.
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 technology continually optimizes power consumption based on the time of day, demand, curtailments imposed by power companies, or other facilities-based events, says Cassatt. 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’re needed again.
According to the company, 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. Cassatt says 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.
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.
For more information, see the Cassatt Web site.
