Sentilla Blog

At AFCOM's Data Center World in Nashville, I presented "Why PUE is not enough: How to measure TRUE success in the data center".  In this talk, I discuss a number of different metrics that merge IT performance with consumed resources (energy, cooling, and space). Also considered is how to carefully choose metrics, so that you use the right metrics to gauge your performance and progress, whether in application performance, IT utilization, energy footprint, or available capacity.  I really enjoyed the talk and had a great interactive audience (sorry that you can't always hear the audience questions in the recording).  I look forward to being invited back to present follow on educational sessions at future AFCOM conferences (such as DCW in October in Las Vegas).  I had a fun time putting together this particular talk, which is different in a number of ways than the talks I gave earlier this year at Data Centre World in London, and the GSMI Green Data Center Conference in San Diego.

If you have any questions or feedback on the talk, please leave them in the comments.  And to Google and Facebook, I really wasn't trying to pick on you!

Today, Sentilla announced version 3.0 of Sentilla Energy Manager.  My role at Sentilla is varied, but one of my responsibilities is creating and managing the product roadmap.  With version 3.0, I'm really excited about how much we've added into this release.  SEM 3.0 is truly revolutionary, providing a ton of features and functionality that no other vendor provides.  It is built on our Sentilla Software Platform, which is in its 4th generation, is very robust, and has served as the basis of all of our products since 2006.

The last few weeks have been busy, with VMWare buying EMC's Ionix assets and the "open source" data center.  I've been talking to the press and commenting on some blogs about the progress, and am posting a round up here.

First, there's an article in Automated Buildings about the need for IT and Facilities to come together to best manage energy in the data center.  This is a position that I've held, because the data center is not there to be a cooling plant.  Instead, IT impacts facilities and everyone must have a view of what's going on to run efficiently and effectively.

There was an announcement about an Open Source Data Center initiative between Mike Manos and GreenM3.  I commented on the blog post, and James Niccolai from IDG wrote up a nice article about the topic and interviewed me for my take on the topic.  I'm still skeptical about how this will actually move forward, and who will be doing the heavy lifting to build the architecture required, but I'm following it closely.

With a lot of the data center energy efficiency focus on facility improvements and virtualization, I've decided we need to take a step back and look instead at the applications.  As Moore's Law has increased the capabilities of servers, and disk density has doubled (roughly) every year, we're no longer as constrained as we used to be by physical resources.

I am, at the heart of it all, a computer scientist.  In grad school, I spent a lot of time working on optimizing software that runs on embedded systems -- little microcontrollers with limited resources.  At the core of these systems was power.  If you wrote your code inefficiently, not only would it fail to fit on the device, it would also burn through batteries.  And as data center operators know, a server without power is a VERY BAD thing.

So why is it then, that we don't look at how efficiently our applications are written?  There's no apples-to-apples energy comparison, and few people take energy into account when buying a software package.  My prediction is that will change.  In a few years, when you evaluate whether to buy (or renew) SAP or Oracle, you'll ask about the energy operating cost of those software packages over the life of the contract.

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".