I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this year's Data Centres Europe (DCE) conference, held in June in Sophia Antipolis, France by BroadGroup.  It was delayed due to the ash cloud mess back in April, when I had planned to originally attend but ended up stuck in London instead.  The event was well attended despite being rescheduled, although the weather in Côte d'Azur was a bit warmer than the organizers had anticipated.

At DCE, I was honored in two ways that I want to share with you.  The first is with an award!  The annual Data Centres Europe awards are given out in a number of categories to recognize innovative data centre design.  With a panel of judges consisting of end users and analysts, I was surprised and excited to hear them announce that I am the recipient of the European CTO Award for Innovation in Data Centres!  In the introduction of the award, the judges introduced me and Sentilla with these nice words:

This Award recognizes the growing challenge to corporations in managing their strategic assets with best-in-class telemetry/tooling. Understanding the characteristics of energy, site performance, and enabling integration between the sub-systems inside the data centre comprising all mechanical, electrical and technology assets for sure requires innovation. The award was made to Joe Polastre, CTO, Sentilla Corporation due to the contribution that their product offering has made in this complex space and in particular the leadership of their CTO.

At Sentilla, we've worked long and hard for quite a few years putting together a system that unites all aspects of data centre energy consumption, connecting to building management systems (BMSs), IT management systems (EMSs), and individual pieces of equipment (like UPSs, PDUs, and servers).  Beyond that, we've filled in the gaps for unmetered equipment with Sentilla Virtual Meters and the Sentilla Inference Engine.  And so not to overwhelm the operator, we've analyzed the information to present only that which is relevant to running an efficient, optimized operation with the Sentilla Analysis Engine.  Thanks to BroadGroup and the judges for recognizing the incredible contributions that engineers at Sentilla have invented.

But I mentioned that I was honored to be at DCE for two reasons.  The second was the opportunity to participate in a panel chaired by an industry friend, Roy Zeighami from Cisco.  Joined by IBM and APC, we discussed which trends will have the most impact on data centres in the future.  My contribution was to describe the data centre as an industrial manufacturing plant, where the output is application compute units.  The result is looking at data centres like a process optimization problem, just like you would when manufacturing any product.  This means we need metrics that involve both applications and energy, like transactions per Watt, if we want to holistically view our data centres and get the most out of them.

All in all, a great event and I look forward to next year.  And for a bit of fun, here's a pic of Roy (on the right) and I (center) at the cocktail reception on the first evening.