Former executives from companies Sun Microsystems, BEA
Systems and Oracle are launching a venture called Cassatt this
week. Its aim is to automate IT operations, use commodity hardware
and software, and govern network compute cycles in a grid-like
manner.
The paradigm being pursued by Cassatt is the management and
aggregation of horizontally scaled, commodity machines, said Rich
Green, executive vice-president of products at Cassatt and former
vice-president of Java and tools at Sun.
Also part of Cassatt are chairman/chief executive officer Bill
Coleman, who held the same positions at BEA, and executive
vice-president and chief technology officer Rob Gingell, who was a
chief engineer at Sun.
"The focus here is all about horizontally scaled systems out of
commodity hardware, and to make that work requires technology that
is not available in [existing] products," such as Computer
Associates' Unicenter or HP OpenView, Green said.
"Grid is a term that certainly could be applied here, but grid
tends to be associated with the high-performance computing space,"
Green said.
The company's Collage Version 2 product, shipping now, is
intended for running large-scale enterprise applications on
commodity Linux servers, according to Cassatt officials.
Key technology functions of Collages include the virtualisation
of storage, operational systems, and data. Web services technology
also is a basis for Collage.
Version 3, due this winter, enables three-tier deployments and
adds Windows as a supported platform. Tiers could include software
such as databases, application and web servers, and data
transformation engines. Additionally, a system administrator with
Version 3 can utilise service-level agreements to ensure, for
example, that at least five servers are running copies of a web
server.
Cassatt's virtualisation technologies enable scaling of machines
and applications without having to make software or network
changes, Green said.
Users are moving to commodity systems and the software market is
moving from monolithic applications to web services and
service-oriented architectures, said Steve Levine, vice-president
of corporate marketing at Cassatt and former vice-president of
marketing at Oracle.
The movement to web services and SOA provides an opportunity for
users to scale out both from hardware and software, said
Levine.
"That creates an opportunity to provide an operations
environment that makes it easier and more effective and reduces the
cost [and]complexity of managing commodity servers," Levine
said.
Collage can be thought of as virtual environment software, said
analyst Dan Kusnetzky, vice-president of system software research
at International Data.
"It allows you to build applications that run on a collection of
machines [on] high-volume, low-cost, industry-standard systems," he
said. The software provides for workload failover and enables
functions such as I/O to be done separately from the application
processing.
Collage provides benefits in management of a cluster of
machines, to make them look like a single machine. The software
also can help ensure that systems are optimally used, Kusnetzky
added.
Collage costs $1,500 (£769) per node, with each piece of
hardware on the network representing a node. While Collage
currently is focused on systems linked in a single location,
support for distributed systems over a wide area is a future
direction.
Paul Krill writes for Infoworld