Sentilla Blog

Hello, I'm Spence Murray, a member of the Sentilla Server Engineering team. My responsibilities include design and development of core networking and data management technologies for Sentilla Energy Manager. Having been involved in the project since its inception, I've had the pleasure of seeing it evolve into a very useful tool for both energy and network management.

First off, I'd like to congratulate our CTO, Joe Polastre, on his recent selection as a one of BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. This award is indicative of the growing buzz Sentilla Energy Manager is generating.

The New York Times recently commissioned Jonathan Koomey to study the growth in data center electricity use between 2005 and 2010.  Koomey's study has a few key findings:

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.

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.

Today, Sentilla announced version 3.0 of Sentilla Energy Manager.  My role at Sentilla is varied, but one of my responsibilities is creating and managing the product roadmap.  With version 3.0, I'm really excited about how much we've added into this release.  SEM 3.0 is truly revolutionary, providing a ton of features and functionality that no other vendor provides.  It is built on our Sentilla Software Platform, which is in its 4th generation, is very robust, and has served as the basis of all of our products since 2006.

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.

Recently, there's been a slew of articles about how IT managers have identified that standardized access to power information over SNMP is one of the top ten problems that they face when managing energy.

We were listening. And today we announced the release of Sentilla Energy Manager for Data Centers version 2.1 which integrates all the great things in the original release like the ability to analyze your energy profile at each piece of equipment and we extended that to include third party equipment. That means that, within an hour of installation, you can get a high level overview of what's going on across the entire data center.

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!

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.

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.

This blog entry first appeared as a contributed news article at ZDNet.  The version posted here includes additional pictures and links to various related topics in line with the post, to provide greater context and justification for the claims made about Google's data centers.

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.

It is not always clear what the right way is to measure the success of your data center's energy strategy.  While many would promote PUE as the right way to go, it does not tell the full story.  Think about these examples:

• A data center is commissioned, but no IT equipment is installed.  The PUE is infinitely high, but it doesn't mean the data center is inefficient.  As IT equipment is added, the PUE drops but the data center's efficiency did not improve.
• As servers and storage are consolidated or virtualized, the overall power consumption of the data center decreases.  Not only is there a reduction in the IT power, but a smaller corresponding reduction in the cooling required.  While the net is a win (more power capacity and less power usage), PUE typically increases.

These aren't the only bad examples of PUE, but they illustrate the fact that it is simply a ratio and it must be understood when talking about it. 

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.

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.

SAP and Sentilla have written a white paper that ties corporate sustainability to the data center and IT operations.   A fully integrated energy management approach in your data center can deliver the energy visibility you need. this approach can help you achieve improvements in system utilization, capacity planning, workload management, and smart capital investment.

As we previously mentioned, Sentilla Energy Manager 3.1 has built-in integration to SAP Carbon Impact and Business Objects Explorer.  Sentilla Energy Manager collects information about everything in the data center, from storage to servers to CRAC units to application utilization, analyzes and summarizes this massive amount of data, and then provides carbon and energy consumption snapshots to SAP's toolset.  This integration brings the data center into enterprise-wide carbon, energy, and resource tracking.  Since data centers are the third or fourth worst carbon and energy offender in enterprises, tools like Sentilla's are needed to bring visibility into IT operations and align IT with corporate goals.

This white paper was written as part of SAP's Green IT community, where Sentilla chairs one of the working groups.  SAP's Green IT initiatives can be found on their website.

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.

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.

Figuring out how to implement the right efficiency plan in the data center is a daunting task.  I often start discussions with customers by asking "How much electricity does your data center use?" and "How much are you paying for electricity?"  While these may seem like such amazingly fundamental questions, you'd be surprised by how many people don't know the answers or respond with "Let me go and look that up."

Further confusing the issue is vendors claims about what they can achieve.  Have you heard the marketing campaign about virtualization reducing your energy bill by 80%?  Sounds compelling right?  The trouble is, you're not going to virtualize every server in your facility and shut off every chiller.  Let's say 20% of your servers can be virtualized (such as staging, dev, and test), and your servers consume 70% of your IT energy consumption, which is 45% of your facility's energy consumption.  So if we add that up, .8*.2*.7*.45 = 5%.  That means that, for your data center, 80% savings just became 5%.

This means that data centers really need to figure out what their strategy is.  And, of course, you want the biggest bang for your buck.  By measuring your baseline, applying the various strategies to it, and calculating ROI, a plan can be formulated that makes sense of the efficiency measures for your specific facility.  I've written an eWeek HowTo titled How To Achieve 40% Energy Savings In Your Data Center.