Sentilla Blog

Are you interested in learning the ins and outs of Sentilla's novel Java platform? Do you want to kick the tires and learn how to build efficient pervasive Java applications? Do you have questions about how garbage collection works? Do you want to know about the Driver model? How about performing asynchronous operations from a synchronous threaded context in Java? And how do you manage all those threads on a resource constrained device with only 10kB of memory?

While Sentilla employees were decompressing from a very busy week at JavaOne, customers that bought a Sentilla Perk kit were already jumping in and building applications using Sentilla's software. Our development community is alive, with a lot of great questions about how to build various applications. There's also quite a few feature requests, such as Mac OSX and Linux support. We're working on it!

With a lot of the data center energy efficiency focus on facility improvements and virtualization, I've decided we need to take a step back and look instead at the applications.  As Moore's Law has increased the capabilities of servers, and disk density has doubled (roughly) every year, we're no longer as constrained as we used to be by physical resources.

I am, at the heart of it all, a computer scientist.  In grad school, I spent a lot of time working on optimizing software that runs on embedded systems -- little microcontrollers with limited resources.  At the core of these systems was power.  If you wrote your code inefficiently, not only would it fail to fit on the device, it would also burn through batteries.  And as data center operators know, a server without power is a VERY BAD thing.

So why is it then, that we don't look at how efficiently our applications are written?  There's no apples-to-apples energy comparison, and few people take energy into account when buying a software package.  My prediction is that will change.  In a few years, when you evaluate whether to buy (or renew) SAP or Oracle, you'll ask about the energy operating cost of those software packages over the life of the contract.