Bull is going to push Cassatt widgetry - software from BEA co-founder Bill Coleman's start-up - to improve the effectiveness of data center infrastructures of large European organizations.

It's going to hit on select lines of business, sectors like large government and local authorities, telecommunications, finance, retail, utilities and manufacturing.

Bull says the widgetry can cut operations, capital and energy costs by at least 30% through dynamic control, repurposing and power management.

But first the Cassatt software suite has to be optimized for Bull's NovaScale and Escala servers. Bull will also distribute the stuff on non-Bull servers. The deal involves consulting services and support.

Bull said the Cassatt software will be marketed as part of its Bio Data Center initiative, which aims at providing customers with "radical new approaches for operating their data centers," focusing on stuff like quality of operational processes, architectural topology and power consumption.

Cassatt concentrates on policy-based management software, controlling and optimizing multiple, diverse components of an organization's IT infrastructure, and providing cloud computing-style benefits using an organization's existing data center resources.

The exercise may be as simple as running less-critical applications or batch-processing jobs when energy costs are low but require modifications to the core processes used to run the data centers.

Virtualization can play a key part in shifting workloads to lower utilization periods, and mean automatically powering down servers and then powering them up again and moving the workload.

To help customers better manage their data centers, Bull and Cassatt say they will provide European organizations a starting point: active power management.

This way, large data center operators can power off their unused servers based on policies they set, minimizing power consumption by a factor of at least 30% for business operations workloads. Other workloads such as application development can reportedly benefit up to 50%. Idle servers can be restarted as business needs require, according to rules based on demand, time, capacity and specific events.

The pair says Cassatt shows a payback in less than one year.

Bull will move all three Cassett editions: Active Response, Standard Edition for increased energy efficiency; Premium Edition for increased energy efficiency and application resiliency; and Data Center Edition for increased energy efficiency, high application availability and server workload management in production environments. This last can also create a cloud-style infrastructure inside a data center using existing IT resources.

Cassatt fancies itself a kind of "data center operating system."