Sentilla Blog

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.