Power management company goes green

Power management company, Cassatt has joined the Green Grid, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to improving energy efficiency in data centers.

The Green Grid's mission is to promote the development of energy efficient processors, servers, networks and other technology and to promote best practices for data centers. However, the consortium is not without its critics.

Last year, the Gartner Group criticized the Green Grid, and said it was missing the opportunity to influence legislation and behavior for broader green issues. It also felt that member self-interest could prevent the group delivering tangible standards.

But Cassatt feels its public commitment to the group is justified.

"More than 65% of people we surveyed recently consider their data center energy efficiency 'average' or worse," said Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt.

"This is a serious issue with both immediate, bottom-line impact and broader, longer-term consequences. By joining The Green Grid, Cassatt is emphasizing its very public commitment to work with key industry influencers to help customers identify and resolve their data center power problems."

Cassatt is known for its Active Response power management products, which turn servers on and off to save power when they are idle. These policy-driven products help reduce data center power demand.

Policies are set by users and the technology continually optimizes power consumption based on the time of day, demand, curtailments imposed by power companies, or other facilities-based events. Some users have recorded a halving of their power usage as a result.

Data centers are facing increased power costs and supply capacity limitations. Although software products from Verdiem and 1E exist and are being used to stop idle PCs wasting power, Cassatt provides an equivalent data center product turning servers on and off as demand for them fluctuates.

Cassatt says its Active Response technology is application-aware; it knows when and how applications can be systematically shut down and brought back up, and it understands application interdependencies shared across multiple servers. It is also hardware and software independent, running on any platform, and requiring no change to existing hardware and software configurations. The technology is compatible with existing power distribution and UPS equipment.

It can also pool physical and virtual servers, re-allocating them as policy and demand levels change. The technology uses a server's internal power controllers and external power distribution units. This means it can be installed quite quickly and easily without disruption to existing data center HW and SW.

IBM meanwhile has a product called Active Energy Manager (AEM), which enables data center staff to cap power usage and monitor energy usage by giving them a view of energy usage within a data center.

AEM supports IBM's x86 System x hardware, servers using IBM's POWER processors and IBM storage products. IBM is adding system z mainframe support to it. Some hardware from other manufacturers is supported. Through the use of intelligent power distribution units, with older servers and other vendor's storage products plugged into them, AEM can monitor their power usage as well. It can also cap power usage on directly supported servers.