"More than 65 percent of people we surveyed recently consider their data centre energy efficiency 'average' or worse", stated Bill Coleman, chairman and CEO of Cassatt Corp. "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. At the same time, we are helping customers move toward more efficient data centres that can actively respond to business requirements through solutions we are delivering to the marketplace."

Cassatt's innovative software lets customers use policy to actively control sets of servers - safely turning servers off when idle or not needed and then back on when demand warrants.

Typically, servers that deliver applications run hot 24 by 7 and their failover systems are always on, which can cost millions of dollars to maintain in terms of real estate, hardware, duplicate software licenses and maintenance contracts, and cooling. However, many servers, especially in development and test centers, scale-out production environments, failover, and disaster recovery sites, sit idle for long periods until they are needed.

By actively powering servers on and off as needed, the Cassatt Active Response product line can cut power usage by as much as 50 percent. The Cassatt products can also be used to pool physical and virtual servers, re-allocating them as policy and demand dictate. This approach improves operational and capital efficiencies, while increasing application availability and making a customer's IT infrastructure more responsive to changing business needs.

The underlying technology in the Cassatt Active Response product line that makes it safe to turn servers off and on is called Cassatt Active Power Management. The technology employs a sophisticated policy engine that takes into account server priorities and needs, server interrelationships, application dependencies and relationships, and

individual server power consumption in deciding when to power-down and power-up machines. It looks at variables such as peak and off-peak power schedules, time of day, and emergencies such as "demand curtailment" mandates from power companies to reduce electrical consumption - for example, on hot summer weekdays. The technology determines which servers to power down, and for how long, and then safely handles application requirements before turning them off and back on as application demand warrants.

Powering off unused servers has been recommended by several key organisations looking closely at the issue of data centre energy efficiency, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), The Uptime Institute, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.

In addition to The Green Grid, Cassatt is a member of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a co-operative effort by local, regional, state, and federal government officials to address major public policy issues affecting the economic health and quality of life in Silicon Valley. Cassatt CFO Karen Willem is executive co-chair of the

Leadership Group's Energy Efficient Data Center Demonstration Project working group. This green IT demonstration project includes approximately 30 Silicon Valley end users, governmental organizations like Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Bay Area universities, and technology vendors working together to deliver examples of smart, energy-efficient data centre computing equipment, operations, and supporting infrastructure.