Cassatt Corporation, an emerging leader in software for automating the management of large, diverse data centers, today announced the availability of Cassatt Collage 4.0. This version of Cassatt’s flagship product includes new virtual machine and network virtualization control capabilities, helping organizations use automation to radically simplify data center management. Cassatt Collage allows IT departments to deliver applications at required service levels by automatically and dynamically allocating the needed computing resources as demand on applications ebbs and flows – dramatically increasing capital efficiency and administrator productivity while slashing operational costs and improving reliability.

As part of this new release, the Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) module of Cassatt Collage becomes the first product to simultaneously support the automated management of VMware ESX 3.0, Xen 3.0, and XenSource XenEnterprise 3.0 virtual machines. In addition, Cassatt Collage 4.0 uses its new Network Virtualization Service (NVS) to work with Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) environments to dynamically configure network switches, allowing resources to be pooled and shared across networks.

These new capabilities expand the Cassatt software’s ability to assign a broad set of data center resources to meet service levels through user-defined policies and priorities. With this release, Cassatt can pool and control physical servers, virtual servers, application servers, and network resources, a key enabler for enterprises to adopt a utility computing model. Customers can begin using Cassatt’s products without disruption to their current IT systems – Cassatt requires no changes to existing software, hardware, systems management, or provisioning systems.

“As IT organizations increasingly deploy virtualization in the data center, they are hoping to improve hardware utilization, lower costs, and become more responsive,” said John Humphreys, program director, Enterprise Virtualization Software for IDC. “But to fully realize these benefits, IT needs to consider management and automation capabilities that can control the diverse components supporting applications – physical and virtual servers, networking, and beyond. This is where Cassatt is focusing: helping organizations automate service levels across both virtualized and non-virtualized resources.”

“With the new capabilities in Collage 4.0, we see customers using this as the operations system for the enterprise data center,” said Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp.

Redefining How Enterprises Do Capacity Planning and Disaster Recovery

The new Collage Network Virtualization Service (NVS) allows the Collage optimization engine to automatically interface with network switches and assign multiple networks to a given application or server. Automating the configuration of network resources improves reliability by eliminating error-prone and time-consuming manual operations on network hardware and enabling pooling of resources across network boundaries. It also allows for applications on multiple networks to draw from a single free pool of resources, enabling dramatic increases in server utilization. This capability allows servers to be “harvested” from other networks (such as systems previously dedicated to only test or development) to automatically respond to a disaster or peak load requirements.