Sentilla Blog

Sentilla is now a member of a data center energy efficiency consortium, known as The Green Grid. With data centers consuming over 1.5% of the United States' electricity according to the EPA, lots of people are interested in how to reduce demand in the data center. To better understand the task at hand, companies have joined forces to make data centers more efficient.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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).

The Chief Information Officer’s job is to keep the data center running. Few receive a congratulatory note when they save the company energy; but they all receive a call when the data center goes down.

The new enterprise relies heavily on the value and support of its IT systems. Downtime can costs thousands of dollars a minute in lost business and productivity. Ebay’s CIO estimates that every minute of downtime in his company’s critical data centers costs $120,000. This places acute pressure on today’s CIO offices to deliver on their SLAs and avoid unscheduled downtime.

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.

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.