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Data Center Capacity Planning and the CIO’s Agenda

Eddie White — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:09:34 -0500

Data Center Capacity Planning and the CIO’s Agenda

Data Center Infrastructure Management, or DCIM, has become top-of-mind these days, and for good reason. There are a number of important trends out there fueling DCIM market growth, including data center consolidation, the move toward virtualization and cloud computing, the need to accelerate service delivery growth, and the desire to reduce power consumption costs.

2011 Cool Vendor Sentilla to Reveal Best Practices for Maximizing Data Center Efficiency at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Anna Luo — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:16:08 -0400

2011 Cool Vendor Sentilla to Reveal Best Practices for Maximizing Data Center Efficiency at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

If you are attending the Gartner Symposium/ITXpo next week, you are in for a treat!

Renowned Expert and CTO, Dr. Joe Polastre, will present on the Modern Data Factory. A winner of Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal 40 Under 40 award and named one of BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs, Dr. Polastre will bring to center stage his innovative concept of managing data centers like modern factories: industrializing them to optimal output with minimized capital investment and operating costs. He will share best practices for data center managers faced with immense challenges in aligning activities with business objectives while keeping costs low.

Bring your questions and ideas to Dr. Polastre’s presentation. Also, come by the Sentilla booths to see a demonstration of Sentilla data center analytics!

Sneak Peak: Announcing Sentilla Analytics for Cloud at VMworld

Joe Polastre — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:21:28 -0400

Sneak Peak: Announcing Sentilla Analytics for Cloud at VMworld

Here's a sneak peak at an upcoming annoucement from Sentilla. We will be showcasing cloud analytics tool that will remove the rampant confusion around the cost and transition strategy to a cloud infrastructure (including hybrid cloud and private cloud). Stay tuned, or visit us at Booth #352 at VMworld in Las Vegas, starting August 29!

Pssst, there's a chance to win a free license to Sentilla Analytics for Cloud and a data center assessment!

SENTILLA TO ANNOUNCE SENTILLA ANALYTICS FOR CLOUD AT VMWORLD 2011

Enter To Win Free License For First Ever Predictive and Financial Analytics Software that Enables Transition to Cloud Architecture

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—August 18, 2011

WHAT: Sentilla, the leading provider of data center analytics, will announce Sentilla Analytics for Cloud, with the first ever ability to perform predictive and financial analysis on transitioning from physical to virtual and cloud infrastructure.

More details on the new module and its capabilities will be announced and showcased on August 29^th at VMworld 2011, The Venetian and The Wynn, Las Vegas. Visit booth #352 during VMworld to see a demo and receive more information, August 29 – September 1, 2011.

Data Center Power Consumption Grows by 56%

Joe Polastre — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:16:58 -0400

Data Center Power Consumption Grows by 56%

The New York Times recently commissioned Jonathan Koomey to study the growth in data center electricity use between 2005 and 2010. Koomey's study has a few key findings:

451 Group Names Sentilla 'Supplier to Watch'

Joe Polastre — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:49:11 -0400

451 Group Names Sentilla 'Supplier to Watch'

The 451 Group has named Sentilla a "Supplier to Watch" in their recent DCIM report by Andy Lawrence and John Stanley. We are honored for 451 to recognize Sentilla's leadership in data center analytics software, including energy management and performance optimization. The 451 Group includes Tier 1 Research, The Info Pro, and the Uptime Institute.

According to the 451 Group report, "Sentilla’s Energy Manager actually focuses on more than energy – it covers environmental data collection and reporting. It also reads IT utilization data, enabling it to model and identify opportunities to reduce waste in space, cooling and power, and to spot underutilized IT capacity. The company is well connected and innovative."

"As datacenters become bigger, denser and more complex, it is clear that the most adaptable, economically sustainable and eco-efficient facilities will be those using advanced infrastructure management software. The three main drivers of investment in DCIM software are economics – mainly through energy-related cost savings – improved availability, and improved manageability and flexibility," said Andy Lawrence, Research Director with The 451 Group.

Energy Drives Business Agility with Increased Elasticity of Data Center Infrastructure

Eddie White — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:04:15 -0400

Energy Drives Business Agility with Increased Elasticity of Data Center Infrastructure

As you develop your IT strategy for the next five to seven years, you, an IT executive, will be asked to support a growing number of new business initiatives within the constraints of a shrinking to flat IT development budget. You are already spending a disproportionate amount of your budget on maintaining the existing data centers. You have insufficient capital expenditure to develop your environment necessary for meeting these new and growing business services. You need to think outside the box. You need to think “energy.”

Here’s one perspective: To efficiently manage your data center, you need to know the actual energy usage of all your assets to prevent over-provisioning while meeting peak demands. By using energy consumption and cost as the base indicator for your data center performance, you can quickly and dynamically balance your compute load with your IT infrastructure -- giving you the elasticity you need to match demand cycles.

This asset-centric approach to energy management simultaneously balances workloads with IT footprint, frees up operational cash flow, and gives you an elastic data center infrastructure. This approach helps you to meet your data center performance objectives, by dynamically balancing your workloads with IT capacity allocation.

Reflecting on Uptime Institute Symposium: Call to Action

Joe Polastre — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:16:17 -0400

Reflecting on Uptime Institute Symposium: Call to Action

Sentilla was at the Uptime Institute Symposium a few weeks back in Santa Clara, and we sponsored the event with our partner SAP. We had a lot of great discussions, from government policy makers to data center managers of varying size enterprises to cloud providers and infrastructure vendors.

But the most impactful takeaway was from Christian Belady and Mike Manos. They put it different ways, but ultimately there message was this: Instead of coming to the conference and saying "there's nothing new", come back next year and actually implement the improvements we've been talking about for the last 10 years!

You can see a snippet in Uptime's video from Mike Manos' presentation.

Green IT – May not lead to Black Numbers and could make your CEO see Red

Eddie White — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:01:25 -0400

Green IT – May not lead to Black Numbers and could make your CEO see Red

As you and your team are grappling with the ever increasing complexity of delivering more services with less resources, increased governance and shrinking budget’s, you are now also being asked to deliver these services and applications within a sustainable environment and have a Green IT initiative….its enough to make you see Red.

There are a number of socio-political considerations driving sustainability and Green IT for CIO’s and it is shaping their approach to the challenge.

European IT teams have conversations that revolve around the current and pending legislation by country. You are focused on compliance and meeting the requirements of the law – that will usually mean meeting the minimum of the requirements. Your focus will be on cost of compliance, planning for delivering your Green IT response, based on meeting the law of the land, not on what the ROI will be or how you and your team will benefit.

Virtualization – Steps to Success on the Journey

Eddie White — Sun, 22 May 2011 13:40:52 -0400

Virtualization – Steps to Success on the Journey

As a data center executive or operational manager you have successfully started and completed your first phase of virtualization and are possibly planning your next deployment. You have quickly and fairly easily taken your virtual footprint from 0% to 20%+. You have met your 2010 objectives, got paid on your MBO’s and have been showcasing your success internally and externally. And at the same time you are planning for the next phases in 2011 and 2012.

With the low hanging fruit gone, the next steps are not so obvious. The ROI is not so clear, and you are also looking outside the realm of your IT world – specifically the services and resources of the business – as the next candidates for virtualization. Will the business units be skeptical about your proposals and challenge your metrics against their reality?

As you plan for your next phase of virtualization, this will be foremost in your mind. As the IT leader you will want to take your team along a virtualization journey to the cloud, deliver value to your business customers in terms of business agility and validate each step of this process. You will face some challenges to this part of the virtualization process. The business will want to see that this is more than an “IT project”, and you will have to meet the business needs as you virtualize.

Will Carbon Regulation Affect the Data Center?

Joe Polastre — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:41:15 -0500

Will Carbon Regulation Affect the Data Center?

With the Carbon Reduction Commitment (now CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme) turned into a flat tax and delayed by a year, many are questioning whether carbon regulation is real. Last year, Mike Manos described a doomsday "CO2K" scenario similar to Y2K. Now that some time has passed, governments have changed, and we've interviewed data center operations about the impact of carbon regulation, I'm weighing in on the issue. Let's put it this way -- unless carbon tax is about FIVE TIMES the cost of electricity, there's no financial motivation to change behavior. That means CO2K is more likely to be like Y2K -- essentially a lot of hype but ultimately a bust. Check out the video blog below, or at Data Centre Solutions.

Think London Names Sentilla "Intelligent Optimiser" and "Company To Watch"

Joe Polastre — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:17:20 -0500

Think London Names Sentilla "Intelligent Optimiser" and "Company To Watch"

This week, Think London named Sentilla one of the top companies to watch in London and listed us as an "Industry Optimiser". We're honored to be named to the list, and receive this recognition from London. Our London base allows us to provide high quality sustainability solutions for both UK and European entprises. If you're in the UK or Europe, give us a call at +44 (0)20-30088540.

Gartner Efficiency Metrics

Joe Polastre — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:35:52 -0500

Gartner Efficiency Metrics

In the process of releasing application tracking in Sentilla Energy Manager, we had some great discussions with Dave Cappuccio and Rakesh Kumar. Our conversations turned to "How do you measure efficiency in the data center?" Of course, we all argue that PUE is not the right metric for determining the efficiency of a data center. Instead, there needs to be more metrics around the applications, their workload, and the overhead they incur. These metrics are at the core of the new application tracking release of Sentilla Energy Manager.

"The new efficiency metric for data centers is compute per kilowatt," said David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for the infrastructure teams, Gartner. "Application energy and cost information is becoming critical for enterprises concerned with optimizing their infrastructures. IT organizations armed with this information will increase their adoption of virtualization and realize energy savings and consolidation benefits more quickly."

Top 5 Myths of Virtualization

Joe Polastre — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:09:50 -0500

Top 5 Myths of Virtualization

Did you know? Many companies actually increase their power consumption when they virtualize. Furthmore, applications that were not doing anything before consolidation are still doing nothing after consolidation! Check out more virtualization myths in this video blog from Joe Polastre, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Sentilla.

Track Application Workload, Efficiency, Energy, and Cost for the First Time

Joe Polastre — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 07:20:32 -0500

Track Application Workload, Efficiency, Energy, and Cost for the First Time

The delivery of IT services is moving from IT as a cost center to IT as a service. Enterprises are looking for flexibility to meet increasing demand, while not exceeding power capacity or budgets. A common question arises: How much does it actually cost to run each of my services? Which systems are performing real work for the business, and which are simply sitting idle?

This week, Sentilla is introducing application tracking, a unique feature that correlates workload with energy consumption and cost. With Sentilla Energy Manager, customers can track where applications are running, how much useful work they're performing, and the amount of energy and cost required to run these services. By integrating workload measurements with energy and cost data for the first time, IT organizations are now empowered to strategically plan for future data center needs with real ground truth data and real business cases.

What's the value of application tracking? It helps you answer these questions:

Joint SAP and Sentilla Whitepaper

Joe Polastre — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:39:02 -0500

Joint SAP and Sentilla Whitepaper

SAP and Sentilla have written a white paper that ties corporate sustainability to the data center and IT operations. A fully integrated energy management approach in your data center can deliver the energy visibility you need. this approach can help you achieve improvements in system utilization, capacity planning, workload management, and smart capital investment.

As we previously mentioned, Sentilla Energy Manager 3.1 has built-in integration to SAP Carbon Impact and Business Objects Explorer. Sentilla Energy Manager collects information about everything in the data center, from storage to servers to CRAC units to application utilization, analyzes and summarizes this massive amount of data, and then provides carbon and energy consumption snapshots to SAP's toolset. This integration brings the data center into enterprise-wide carbon, energy, and resource tracking. Since data centers are the third or fourth worst carbon and energy offender in enterprises, tools like Sentilla's are needed to bring visibility into IT operations and align IT with corporate goals.

This white paper was written as part of SAP's Green IT community, where Sentilla chairs one of the working groups. SAP's Green IT initiatives can be found on their website.

Cyber Monday is Data Center Efficiency Day

Joe Polastre — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:04:33 -0500

Cyber Monday is Data Center Efficiency Day

When it comes to "efficiency", there's a lot of different definitions for what makes a data center efficient. Fundamentally, efficiency is how much work is done per unit of energy. And when it comes to Cyber Monday, today is the most efficient day for many data centers.

Just think about it -- normally servers are sitting around idle, waiting for a job a to do. They have low utilization, but are needed for availability to ensure that all customers can access your websites and make purchases without any hassles when the demand picks up. Most servers in data centers run at a utilization rate of around 8 to 12%, but what's even more frightening is 83% of data center managers don't even know what the utilization of their systems is. When it comes to ensuring availability of compute resources on heavy demand days like Cyber Monday, it is scary to think that most don't even know how much headroom they have.

Should you paint your roof?

Chris Merlin — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 15:36:52 -0500

Should you paint your roof?

2010 is one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons with 19 named storms so far. On the West coast, September 27, 2010 saw Los Angeles break an all time high-temperature record at 113F—possibly more but the official thermometer broke!

As outside temperatures went up, heat seeped into buildings, forcing air conditioners to turn on and add additional demand onto the electricity grid.

Innovation without Disruption

Joe Polastre — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:05:17 -0400

Innovation without Disruption

The theme at this year's SAP TechEd conference is "Innovation without Disruption". What a fitting theme for Sentilla as well, as we share SAP's desire to bring innovation to the data center without causing any disruption. The idea is simple: if you build a platform that leverages the existing architecture but bridges it to new technologies, you can migrate a customer from a legacy approach to a modern approach without disrupting their applications. As you can imagine, this is important with big ERP, CRM, PI, etc systems that must be available.

SAP's Green IT Initiative and TechEd Events

Joe Polastre — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 07:05:35 -0400

SAP's Green IT Initiative and TechEd Events

Over the last few months, I've had the pleasure of getting to know the team at SAP. What has been interesting in working with SAP is the wealth of products and business intelligence that they bring to the table, not to mention their diversity. With a tremendous presence in Europe as well as the US, they really have a global look at how enterprises are dealing with sustainability. SAP's acquisition of Clear Standards last year enhanced their portfolio with a carbon and financial management solution (renamed to SAP Carbon Impact). It is still an emerging market, and there's a number of players to watch (Hara, ENXSuite, and C3 just to name a few).

Eliminate Energy-Related Data Center Downtime

Chris Merlin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:50:42 -0400

Eliminate Energy-Related Data Center Downtime

The Chief Information Officer’s job is to keep the data center running. Few receive a congratulatory note when they save the company energy; but they all receive a call when the data center goes down.

The new enterprise relies heavily on the value and support of its IT systems. Downtime can costs thousands of dollars a minute in lost business and productivity. Ebay’s CIO estimates that every minute of downtime in his company’s critical data centers costs $120,000. This places acute pressure on today’s CIO offices to deliver on their SLAs and avoid unscheduled downtime.