Sentilla Blog

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.

On the same day, two opposing articles have been published with completely opposite points of view.  On one side, Brian Fry argues that location no longer matters and we should build data centers in the most efficient locations and supply fiber connectivity to them.  On the other side, Paris Burstyn argues that location and latency are business critical for companies resulting in Equinix's acquisition of Switch and Data.

At the center of Brian's argument is that low cost, low carbon power is good for data centers.  If you can live with your data centers a few milliseconds away from everyone else's, then your IT operations can be greener and cheaper, a win-win scenario.  But in the world where every millisecond counts, that's not the right solution for all industries.

As you and your team are grappling with the ever increasing complexity of delivering more services with less resources, increased governance and shrinking budget’s, you are now also being asked to deliver these services and applications within a sustainable environment and have a Green IT initiative….its enough to make you see Red.

There are a number of socio-political considerations driving sustainability and Green IT for CIO’s and it is shaping their approach to the challenge.

European IT teams have conversations that revolve around the current and pending legislation by country. You are focused on compliance and meeting the requirements of the law – that will usually mean meeting the minimum of the requirements. Your focus will be on cost of compliance, planning for delivering your Green IT response, based on meeting the law of the land, not on what the ROI will be or how you and your team will benefit.

Sentilla is honored to win another product award.  We’re very excited that energy management has gained so much traction this year.  But it’s no surprise.  As the UK embraces the Carbon Reduction Commitment and with the publication of the European Code of Conduct for Data Centres, it has become clear that a solution is needed for managing and tracking data center energy use. The award validates the need for energy management in data centers and Sentilla is humbled to be part of this movement.

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.