Hello, I'm Spence Murray, a member of the Sentilla Server Engineering team. My responsibilities include design and development of core networking and data management technologies for Sentilla Energy Manager. Having been involved in the project since its inception, I've had the pleasure of seeing it evolve into a very useful tool for both energy and network management.

First off, I'd like to congratulate our CTO, Joe Polastre, on his recent selection as a one of BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. This award is indicative of the growing buzz Sentilla Energy Manager is generating.

During development of Sentilla Energy Manager (SEM), the engineering team often found interesting behaviors among laptops, desktops, servers and other hardware within our offices. Describing some of this information as merely "insightful" just scratches the surface; we're discovering that "awareness" of energy consumption is half the battle. Once we knew more about energy utilization, we were able to do something about it. Replacing less efficient equipment, simply turning off devices, and even changing network configurations can make a significant contribution to energy savings. At the data center scale, these savings can be quite significant, to say the least.

SEM not only provides the display of energy utilization, it also analyzes collected data. Thus, it becomes possible to instruct SEM to detect particular behaviors throughout the data center. Data center operators may decide to be notified when various power usage tolerances are exceeded, or when power distribution changes in undesired ways. Utilization can be tracked over a period of minutes, days weeks or months. All these metrics can be applied to any subset of the data center's various networks. Or even grouped by customer within the data center. Further, SEM's administrative interface can be accessed from a web browser, and configured to give different users specific views of the collected data -- allowing data center operators to provide the value-add of customer-specific views of power usage to their customers.

As an engineer involved in the development of SEM, the usefulness of increased awareness of energy utilization has become extremely apparent. Sentilla's own offices are instrumented with Sentilla smart power meters, which wirelessly send power usage measurements to SEM. In addition, SEM manages off-the-shelf, SNMP-enabled PDU's to provide a comprehensive view of our complete intranet.