Sentilla Blog

This week, I'm super excited to give a talk at PICNIC. This is the TED of Europe and everyone from Richard Branson to Genevieve Bell (ala Intel) to Werner Vogels to a million other amazing individuals will be speaking. They all have a huge interest in changing the world, and they are doing it today. They're focusing on energy, environment, IT, media, and really everything else. I'm honored to give a talk in the presence of such luminary individuals.

On a recent flight, I had the pleasure of watching a number of episodes of E2, a PBS show narrated by Morgan Freeman.  The shows cover a number of environmental topics and features Stephen Chu, former energy expert at LBL and now Secretary of Energy.  If you haven't seen them, I highly recommend finding a few episodes. Unfortunately, only the "design" episodes are on hulu, the "energy" and "transport" episodes have not been posted online.

A couple of things stood out at me, and I came away with a feeling that we could do better at achieving energy efficiency and energy independence.  Not just because we should as a planet-saving activity, but because we've actually gone backwards in efficiency in the last 100 years.

First, consider this statistic:  The first Ford Model T accepted both Ethanol and Gasoline, and got 25 miles to the gallon.  Today's cars average 21 miles to the gallon, and while it only costs $50 to outfit a gasoline car at production with Ethanol capabilities, few cars are actually "FlexFuel".

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.

Sentilla is excited to win the American Business Award for Best Software Product of the Year for Sentilla Energy Manager for Data Centers. There are essentially two ways to solve the global warming problem: find alternative sources of energy or reduce the energy you're currently using. Wind, solar, and tide power are great.

They've come a long way in a short amount of time. But it's going to take a lot more than that to solve this problem because the world's appetite for energy is so immense. In addition to using alternative energy sources, we need to take a closer look at how we use today's energy and find ways to cut back. Improving energy efficiency can be tremendously valuable because the cheapest power plant ever built is the one you don't have to build.

This has never been more profound than in the case of data centers, whose energy consumption, globally, is greater than the country of Israel. This is clearly an area where much can be done and Sentilla Energy Manager for Data Centers is directly addressing this issue.

We appreciate the award and consider it validation that this market segment is not only in need of a solution, but that we are well positioned to provide an answer to this growing problem.

In so many ways, the Cisco announcement was a throwback to the last century. Yes, it was BIG. Satellite uplinks, worldwide audience, a parade of Cisco executives and a roomful of attendees in a world-class venue. John Chambers is extremely compelling and I always enjoy his presentations. I have tremendous respect for him, and for what Cisco has done and is doing for the industry.

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.

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.

BNP Media put on the Green Intelligent Buildings conference in Arlington, VA this spring. I was there, and gave a talk on what sustainability means to green buildings. Utlimately the message was this: There are 3 steps to maintaining a sustainable building -- measure, analyze, and act. While most think they can measure once and expect the result months later to be the same, the collective view was that people are the most disruptive force to a green building. Continually measuring, analyzing, and acting is what differentiates an audit from sustainability. There were a number of sophisticated companies there, and it was great to learn the different ways that they keep buildings running efficiently. Tridium was quite impressive -- they are wrestling the large Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric of the world and attacking the SMB market (and, it appears, winning).

Randy Katz, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has embarked on a new project called LoCal. Short for any number of things, including "Lo(w) Cal(orie)", "Local Information", and of course "Cal", Katz has thrown Berkeley's hat in the ring to make energy smart in the 21st century. I had the privilege of bouncing ideas off Katz while a graduate student at Cal, and he gave a talk about LoCal at the 2009 EECS BEARS Symposium.

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.

Recent studies indicate that, as IT professionals look to trim power expenditures and move toward ever greener IT solutions, energy efficiency metrics will become an ever more critical data point in their decision-making process.  According to a recent Gartner
study, many IT and data center managers consider green IT a top priority, but have yet to embrace measurement and monitoring infrastructure critical to determine energy-saving measures and satisfy government regulations.

Efficiency metrics span the gamut from the GreenGrid's PUE and DCIE to the E.U.'s Code of Conduct for Data Centres Energy Efficiency.  In all cases, energy utilization measurement and analysis is a necessary step to understanding how IT architecture and provisioning can be improved.  Data indicating a server's idle power usage, work done per watt, comparison of energy usage for comparable equipment, and sustained efficiency over time merely scratch the surface.

I had the privilege of being one of the only -- and possibly the only -- startup person attending Google's Green Data Center Summit held at their Mountain View campus. While there were a wide variety of talks (which I'll cover with some analysis in a subsequent post), the gadget hacker in me loved how Google unveiled and described their servers.

Completely custom designed and built in Google-style, here's what they did:

ECN asked technology leaders to brainstorm solutions that would make the most impact, specifically which green technology has the most commercial promise. I responded, along with 7 others, and our thoughts were published in the March issue. I've included my response below, and you can view the ECN March issue for the full set of responses.

New energy is really expensive. The most commercially viable option is to reduce your own energy use, which, as stated by the Obama Administration, is the cleanest fastest easiest, cheapest way to generate renewable energy. In order to reduce your energy consumption, you need to know precisely where and when you're using it.