Sentilla Blog

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.

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.

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!

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.