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Agenda and Resources 2. Real-World Benefits 3. Benefits of Virtualization Read a complete transcript of the podcast here |
If San Jose, CA-based Cassatt Software has its way, some of the bigger IT infrastructure management vendors had better watch their backs.
Cassatt was named after Mary Cassatt, a 19th century American impressionist and revolutionary whose outlook Cassatt Software hopes to emulate.
Cassatt’s recently upgraded Collage program uses an open source, Web-based approach that makes use of virtualization technology in order to provide a cheaper way to control network resources in order to meet peak demands.
“What we do is help pool your resources, whether they’re virtual or physical, so you get better utilization of them,” said Cassatt Product Management Director Ken Oestreich. “Then on an operational side of things, we automate a lot of the day-to-day firefighting and provisioning and scaling, so that your operational resources are at times more efficient."
What Collage Offers
Oestreich explains that Collage helps companies to pool their physical and virtual resources for better utilization, efficiency, and power reduction. Although Cassatt itself is not a virtualization provider, Collage does use virtualization to decouple hardware and software and networks as a part of its ability to pool virtual resources. Collage then attaches an SOA service-level agreement that is defined to each application and then deploys the application into the pool. Then, during peak times, Collage can manage resource allocation in order to make sure that applications have the resources they need to run.
Advantages of Virtualization
Virtualization offers a great deal of potential benefits in terms of performance and agility, in part because it offers operating system and platform independence, meaning companies don’t need to make system-wide changes in order to use the software.
Although performance is a common concern in applications that use virtualization, “there is actually no performance hit taken,” says Oestreich. “We don’t employ any software layers; we don’t employ any agents on existing servers. We sit off to the side as a kind of a universal remote control, if you will.”
The approach improves business agility, says Oestreich, because the pooled, automated approach gives IT management a faster time to market -– in effect, dropping an application into a pool of resources without the need for traditional consolidation planning.
Collage integrates well with other enterprise application needs, such as asset management, compliance management, and business process management -– and you can use an existing BPM system to help govern service-level agreements that are governed by Collage.
SOA Governance and Testing
Cassatt Collage operates at a hardware infrastructure level, and most people think of SOA at a software level, but Oestreich points out that Collage helps customers to achieve an overall service-oriented infrastructure that can adapt to SOA component needs.
Although it’s impossible to always predict the number of SOA components, associated load levels and demands, each component has an SLA and you might have thousands of these in an environment, said Oestrich.
“From a governance perspective, we can automatically adapt the hardware infrastructure to continually support the sometimes unpredictable demands of SOA components and composite applications,” he said. “So there's a beautiful, beautiful, complementarity between the service level automation that we do and SOA."
Cost versus Functionality
Capital costs are not traditionally a driving force behind data center management, with many companies spending as much as 30 to 40 percent of annual costs on the data center and 50 to 60 percent or more on operational costs.
Oestreich believes that Cassatt Collage will allow companies to get what they need but also to save on operational costs. Rather than hardwiring everything into a physical data center, he uses an electricity analogy. If you pool generation facilities, then the appropriate amount of electricity will flow to your wire, whether it’s a 100 watt bulb or a 10,000 watt lighting system for a stadium. With virtualized resource allocation, the same applies to software.
“When a Web site goes from a thousand hits to a million hits, you just open up another generator. You turn on another machine automatically to accommodate that,” he said. “Computing power is definitely, definitely going in this direction."
For more on this, be sure to listen to the entire 9:01 podcast.
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