Cassatt Corp. is betting that soaring energy costs and increased green awareness in IT will make a new feature in Cassatt Active Response data center management software appealing. With the release of Version 5.1 last week, users of the San Jose-based company's tool will be able to set policies to turn servers off when the software detects that they are idle.
Jay Fry, vice president of marketing, says the policies are broad enough to accommodate virtually anyone's definition of idle. And he doesn't think data center managers should be reluctant to turn servers off. "It's an urban myth that it's a bad thing," he contends.
Ken Oestreich, director of product management, adds that it's not enough for IT managers to buy power-efficient servers or rely solely on server consolidation to achieve green goals. "Just because you buy energy-efficient light bulbs doesn't mean you forget about light switches," he says. Cassatt Active Response 5.1 works with various types of management software, such as load balancers and trouble-ticket systems, so that false alerts aren't generated. The upgrade also supports more server systems' power controllers, including Sun's. Pricing starts at $200 per managed machine.Dance, Apps, Dance!
If Web services-based applications dance, it's a slow waltz, since choreographing the work among various dependent services can bog down systems. But this August, Strangeloop Networks Inc. in Vancouver, British Columbia, will release the WS1000 Web Services Accelerator appliance to help your apps pick up the tempo. According to Virginia Balcom, vice president of marketing, the device uses the company's "choreography engine" to cache data from the various services, thereby offloading requests from the primary systems. Because the appliance is tuned for things such as SOAP calls, it can anticipate impending data requests and prefetch them to the cache, further speeding the application.
Joshua Bixby, senior vice president of products and sales, says the WS1000 watches how a Web services app works and optimizes its performance based on what it learns.
The WS1000 will start at $30,000.
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