cassatt

Five things Cassatt taught us about cloud computing

The widely reported sale of key technology and talent assets from utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt to CA on Tuesday serves as a lesson to us all about the challenges that lay before enterprises transitioning to virtualization, automation and cloud computing.

I had reported that the end was near a few weeks ago, and former Cassatt Director of Product Marketing Ken Oestreich (now at Egenera) posted a beautiful overview of what CA is getting from Cassatt, and the opportunities that now lay the new owners.

I wanted to take a moment myself to reflect on what I learned during my … Read more

CA buys assets from data center automation firm Cassatt

[UPDATE: Clarification that CA "acquired some of their data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets" rather than the company as such.]

Although it's hardly unique to this area of technology, it seems as if the start-ups in the forefront of developing data center automation tools have had a particularly tough time flourishing as standalone businesses even before the current spending downturn.

The latest casualty is Cassatt, from whom CA is acquiring data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets on undisclosed terms. From Tuesday's press release:

Cassatt's Rob Gingell, executive vice president … Read more

Cassatt is running out of runway

I knew it was coming, but I am greatly saddened that this time has come.

In an article on Forbes.com Monday, William "Bill" Coleman--former Sun executive, and the "B" in BEA--let it be known that his latest venture, Cassatt, is close to shutting its doors for good. With heavy investment from the likes of Warburg Pincus (reportedly well north of $100 million), Cassatt describes itself as "champion(ing) the vision of managing data centers like a 'compute utility.'"

Cassatt has been building and selling policy-driven infrastructure automation of various sorts for most of … Read more

FDA tests internal cloud for disaster recovery

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is looking at using an internal (or private) cloud to manage disaster recovery.

In early testing, Joe Klosky, a senior tech adviser at the FDA, was able to successfully restart applications and services within 45 minutes onto other, differently configured servers in their environment without issues using Cassatt Active Response, not people or outsourced services.

Klosky notes:

"An internal cloud approach means that we do not have to pay for costly service contracts with outsourcers, nor do we have to dedicate rooms full of servers to sit idly by just in case … Read more

Internal clouds make enterprises feel comfortable

No enterprise is going to put anything important in a public cloud for a very long time. If you run the IT infrastructure for any significant-scale enterprise your current reality tends to be a bit sobering if not downright depressing.

Your data centers are a mix of many different server flavors, operating systems, application platforms, and even virtualization technologies that no cloud provider can currently support without major expense and disruption.

To consider an internal cloud, CIOs are going to have to get over a few hurdles.

First, they need to know what they have in their data centers and … Read more