Cassatt, a power management company, has joined the Green Grid, a non-profit consortium dedicated to improving energy efficiency in data centres.
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 per cent of people we surveyed recently consider their data centre 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 centre 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 are designed to help reduce data centre 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 centres 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 centre 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.
