Software start-up Cassatt this week continued its virtualization march with a new release of its flagship product that adds more support for server partitioning software.

Customers can now test out Collage 4.0. Like its predecessors, the software helps companies treat all of their servers as one large computer. This format makes it easier to free up more processing power or bandwidth to certain applications on the fly. The new release, however, also adds additional server slicing tools.

The fresh Collage can now tap into Cassatt's Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) and control virtual machines created by VMware ESX 3.0, Xen 3.0 and XenEnterprise 3.0. Cassatt had promised such additions earlier this year and has delivered on the pledge. So, customers can fiddle with all their virtual machines and server applications from one spot.

Version 4.0 also adds tools for configuring network switches.

Cassatt continues to look like the real deal in the virtualization game, providing a broad set of tools for customers to manage a large number of servers. It does, however, face the same challenges as other start-ups in that it has struggled to build out a broad customer list.

The company sees the next couple of years as its major test. ®