Cassatt, a provider of enterprise software to enable dynamic IT infrastructures, has announced a partnership with XenSource, the infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the Xen open source hypervisor, under which Cassatt will be able to sell XenEnterprise alongside Cassatt’s products.

Under terms of the agreement, Cassatt can provide both virtualization from XenSource and automation solutions from Cassatt to enterprise-level customers who are deploying server consolidation and other strategies for optimizing their data centers.

“Data centers are moving toward a more dynamic model, and as they do so, we see enterprises doing more and more with server virtualization, while gaining an understanding of what role virtualization should play," said John Humphreys, program director of IDC Enterprise Virtualization Software program. "We also believe that as virtualization use cases expand, organizations will see the business benefits of automating the management of their virtual resources alongside their physical ones. Cassatt and XenSource are making it easier for customers to bring automation and virtualization to create a more responsive IT infrastructure.”

The Cassatt automation solutions allow customers to automate and manage the operations of both their physical and virtual servers while supporting their need to choose the appropriate virtualization technology for their particular infrastructure. The Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) is built using a vendor-neutral architecture, which will allow customers to host any combination of virtual machines. XVM will support XenEnterprise in the next release of the product later this calendar year. Earlier in the year, Cassatt announced XVM support for VMware ESX and VMware Server.

In addition, customers can use the Cassatt solution to manage their physical servers from a range of vendors including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and others.

Customers using XenEnterprise can leverage paravirtualization, which is the key innovation of the Xen hypervisor, together with microprocessor support for virtualization, to deliver near “bare metal” performance to virtualized guest operating systems. The combined solution allows customers to immediately realize the power of Intel Virtualization Technology and next-generation AMD Virtualization for server consolidation. XenEnterprise delivers an integrated virtualization package to simplify deployment, provisioning, and management of an X86 server infrastructure.

“We are excited to have Cassatt sell XenEnterprise to enterprise customers alongside their solutions,” said John Glendenning, vice president of sales for XenSource. “By using XenEnterprise, organizations can implement a virtualization platform resulting in increased server utilization, IT cost reduction, and improved operational agility. XenEnterprise supplies customers with a superior virtualization solution that provides openness and price performance benefits over proprietary offerings. The coupling of XenEnterprise with the Cassatt Collage XVM offering for data center resource management and automation is very compelling.”