Sentilla Blog

When it comes to management, one of the things I ask customers is what management tools they use.  There's always a laundry list, some open-source (like Nagios) and some from large software vendors (like Tivoli).  These IT management tools are used to get a handle on computing, storage, networking, and applications -- 4 of the primary assets in a data center.  But when I ask what they use for energy management, there's usually a blank stare.  Energy, as you may have guessed, is the fifth major asset.  As with any of these assets, if you run out of capacity, your applications go down.  If you don't manage them proactively, your performance suffers.  Energy is no different.  And with pressure to reduce cost, improve performance, plan for increased or decreased capacity, or mitigate potential risks, management tools are the key to accomplishing these tasks. 

Awareness of the importance of energy in the data center has grown dramatically in the last few years.  And due to the importance of energy in business continutity and contribution to data center operating costs, it is logical that it is time to get a handle on energy in 2010.

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.

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.

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).

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the difference between monitoring and management.  This week, I received an email with the title "Revolutionizing Energy Management".  Interesting, I wonder what management solution this company provides for energy.  The content of the email went on to talk about a brand new meter that provides real time power load information.  While I'm sure this company's meter is very innovative (names purposely omitted to protect the innocent), it was clear that this company did not understand what the word "management" even means.

I'd like to point out the difference between management and monitoring.  There are a LOT of tools for monitoring but much fewer for management.

Monitoring is the process of being aware of the state of a system.  It involves observing the current situation and typically necessitates a measuring device or meter.  Monitoring typically results in a large set of data, un-correlated and un-analyzed.  The data is not tied to your business objectives but is just data, it is that simple.  It is up to you, as the human, to figure out what all this data means.

Management, in contrast, is the act of getting a system to deliver a desired goal/objective.  It involves managing and allocating resources, organizing resources to execute a task, designing and re-designing systems, and optimizing a system to produce useful outcomes.  Monitoring is a key component to management; after all you need credible information to make decisions.

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.

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:

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.

In October, 2009, President Obama issued an Executive Order (EO 13514) that set federal energy efficiency standards.  EO 13514 superceeds the previous executive order put in place by President Bush (EO 13423) from 2007.  While the previous order required the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3% per year, totaling at least a 30% reduction by 2015 from 2003 levels, Obama's order actually lets each department set their own goal.  EO 13514, in contrast to EO 13423, is much more specific about the improvements that have to be made in transportation fleets, building design, etc.  Just to be clear, this order only applies to federal government and their respective organizations, not the country at large.  You can think of it as a government-specific climate bill.

What's more important, is that EO 13514 has specific language about data centers.  Federal organizations must "implement best management practices for energy-efficient management of servers and Federal data centers."  The goal is to bring the Federal government in line with commercial best practices.  The government has thus set some very generic "Guiding Principals", and then it is up to each of the organizations to meet their stated GHG goals for Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 emissions. Let's take a look at what some of the government organizations have done to comply with EO 13514.

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."

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.

Data centers and the equipment they house have come a long way since the days of the mainframe. Despite how different the computing systems may look today, they actually share a lot of similarities. Cloud computing and virtualization look a lot like distributed mainframes, and systems are moving back to old benchmarks that incorporate power and workload.

Energy and Green IT have become the hot topic, and a recent article illustrated to me how much confusion is out there in the market. Vendors (like Sentilla) are all competing for the same resources and budget, whereas the media simply doesn't have enough time to investigate the industry as fully as analysts have done (and are still doing). I've been encouraging analysts from Gartner, IDC, Forrester, and others to put out a "data center energy management landscape" document, to set the record straight on how each of the vendors interact and compete. Unfortunately no such document exists yet.