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?

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.

I wrote earlier about IBM's high density Blue Gene/P data center that is a state of the art HPC system fitting tons of computing power into a small space.  It pushes the envelope in a number of ways, including how to keep it cool, and how to provide enough power at such high density.

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine profiled Watson, the system running on the Blue Gene/P cluster at the T.J. Watson Research Center in order to take on humans at Jeopardy!  The article is lengthy, but the video is equally entertaining.

IBM has their own website too that explains Watson.

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!

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:

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.

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.

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.