Recent studies indicate that, as IT professionals look to trim power expenditures and move toward ever greener IT solutions, energy efficiency metrics will become an ever more critical data point in their decision-making process.  According to a recent Gartner
study, many IT and data center managers consider green IT a top priority, but have yet to embrace measurement and monitoring infrastructure critical to determine energy-saving measures and satisfy government regulations.

Efficiency metrics span the gamut from the GreenGrid's PUE and DCIE to the E.U.'s Code of Conduct for Data Centres Energy Efficiency.  In all cases, energy utilization measurement and analysis is a necessary step to understanding how IT architecture and provisioning can be improved.  Data indicating a server's idle power usage, work done per watt, comparison of energy usage for comparable equipment, and sustained efficiency over time merely scratch the surface.

Within Sentilla Corporation's offices, equipment consolidation efforts have been motivated simply through use the of Sentilla Energy Manager on our own infrastructure, pinpointing cost-effective network architecture changes and application virtualization opportunities.  On the data center scale, these changes translate into reduced power requirements and cost savings.  Sentilla Energy Manager goes a step further - the system can identify exceeded consumption thresholds or ill-behaved power usage trends and notify network administrators.

For further reading, see Gartner's study "Data Centers Focus on Green IT, but Many Neglect Metrics".