Sentilla Blog

What do 15,000 Java developers have in common? Besides a love of object-oriented programming languages and an oddly-shaped mascot named Duke, Java developers act en masse. How do we know? Sentilla was commissioned by Sun Microsystems to instrument the Moscone Center in San Francisco with over 200 pervasive computers during the 2008 JavaOne conference. Sun wanted to have greater insight into the behavior of attendees during the conference so that organizers could adjust energy-usage in real-time and better plan for future events. Each morning, John Gage presented Sentilla's findings.

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.

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.

Sentilla was at the Uptime Institute Symposium a few weeks back in Santa Clara, and we sponsored the event with our partner SAP.  We had a lot of great discussions, from government policy makers to data center managers of varying size enterprises to cloud providers and infrastructure vendors.

But the most impactful takeaway was from Christian Belady and Mike Manos.  They put it different ways, but ultimately there message was this: Instead of coming to the conference and saying "there's nothing new", come back next year and actually implement the improvements we've been talking about for the last 10 years!

You can see a snippet in Uptime's video from Mike Manos' presentation.

When it comes to management, one of the things I ask customers is what management tools they use.  There's always a laundry list, some open-source (like Nagios) and some from large software vendors (like Tivoli).  These IT management tools are used to get a handle on computing, storage, networking, and applications -- 4 of the primary assets in a data center.  But when I ask what they use for energy management, there's usually a blank stare.  Energy, as you may have guessed, is the fifth major asset.  As with any of these assets, if you run out of capacity, your applications go down.  If you don't manage them proactively, your performance suffers.  Energy is no different.  And with pressure to reduce cost, improve performance, plan for increased or decreased capacity, or mitigate potential risks, management tools are the key to accomplishing these tasks. 

Awareness of the importance of energy in the data center has grown dramatically in the last few years.  And due to the importance of energy in business continutity and contribution to data center operating costs, it is logical that it is time to get a handle on energy in 2010.

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.

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.