Sentilla Blog

On a recent flight, I had the pleasure of watching a number of episodes of E2, a PBS show narrated by Morgan Freeman.  The shows cover a number of environmental topics and features Stephen Chu, former energy expert at LBL and now Secretary of Energy.  If you haven't seen them, I highly recommend finding a few episodes. Unfortunately, only the "design" episodes are on hulu, the "energy" and "transport" episodes have not been posted online.

A couple of things stood out at me, and I came away with a feeling that we could do better at achieving energy efficiency and energy independence.  Not just because we should as a planet-saving activity, but because we've actually gone backwards in efficiency in the last 100 years.

First, consider this statistic:  The first Ford Model T accepted both Ethanol and Gasoline, and got 25 miles to the gallon.  Today's cars average 21 miles to the gallon, and while it only costs $50 to outfit a gasoline car at production with Ethanol capabilities, few cars are actually "FlexFuel".

Sentilla is honored to win another product award.  We’re very excited that energy management has gained so much traction this year.  But it’s no surprise.  As the UK embraces the Carbon Reduction Commitment and with the publication of the European Code of Conduct for Data Centres, it has become clear that a solution is needed for managing and tracking data center energy use. The award validates the need for energy management in data centers and Sentilla is humbled to be part of this movement.

When it comes to management, one of the things I ask customers is what management tools they use.  There's always a laundry list, some open-source (like Nagios) and some from large software vendors (like Tivoli).  These IT management tools are used to get a handle on computing, storage, networking, and applications -- 4 of the primary assets in a data center.  But when I ask what they use for energy management, there's usually a blank stare.  Energy, as you may have guessed, is the fifth major asset.  As with any of these assets, if you run out of capacity, your applications go down.  If you don't manage them proactively, your performance suffers.  Energy is no different.  And with pressure to reduce cost, improve performance, plan for increased or decreased capacity, or mitigate potential risks, management tools are the key to accomplishing these tasks. 

Awareness of the importance of energy in the data center has grown dramatically in the last few years.  And due to the importance of energy in business continutity and contribution to data center operating costs, it is logical that it is time to get a handle on energy in 2010.

On the same day, two opposing articles have been published with completely opposite points of view.  On one side, Brian Fry argues that location no longer matters and we should build data centers in the most efficient locations and supply fiber connectivity to them.  On the other side, Paris Burstyn argues that location and latency are business critical for companies resulting in Equinix's acquisition of Switch and Data.

At the center of Brian's argument is that low cost, low carbon power is good for data centers.  If you can live with your data centers a few milliseconds away from everyone else's, then your IT operations can be greener and cheaper, a win-win scenario.  But in the world where every millisecond counts, that's not the right solution for all industries.

Figuring out how to implement the right efficiency plan in the data center is a daunting task.  I often start discussions with customers by asking "How much electricity does your data center use?" and "How much are you paying for electricity?"  While these may seem like such amazingly fundamental questions, you'd be surprised by how many people don't know the answers or respond with "Let me go and look that up."

Further confusing the issue is vendors claims about what they can achieve.  Have you heard the marketing campaign about virtualization reducing your energy bill by 80%?  Sounds compelling right?  The trouble is, you're not going to virtualize every server in your facility and shut off every chiller.  Let's say 20% of your servers can be virtualized (such as staging, dev, and test), and your servers consume 70% of your IT energy consumption, which is 45% of your facility's energy consumption.  So if we add that up, .8*.2*.7*.45 = 5%.  That means that, for your data center, 80% savings just became 5%.

This means that data centers really need to figure out what their strategy is.  And, of course, you want the biggest bang for your buck.  By measuring your baseline, applying the various strategies to it, and calculating ROI, a plan can be formulated that makes sense of the efficiency measures for your specific facility.  I've written an eWeek HowTo titled How To Achieve 40% Energy Savings In Your Data Center.