Sentilla Blog

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.

Here's a sneak peak at an upcoming annoucement from Sentilla. We will be showcasing cloud analytics tool that will remove the rampant confusion around the cost and transition strategy to a cloud infrastructure (including hybrid cloud and private cloud).  Stay tuned, or visit us at Booth #352 at VMworld in Las Vegas, starting August 29!

Pssst, there's a chance to win a free license to Sentilla Analytics for Cloud and a data center assessment!

SENTILLA TO ANNOUNCE SENTILLA ANALYTICS FOR CLOUD AT VMWORLD 2011

Enter To Win Free License For First Ever Predictive and Financial Analytics Software that Enables Transition to Cloud Architecture

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—August 18, 2011

WHAT: Sentilla, the leading provider of data center analytics, will announce Sentilla Analytics for Cloud, with the first ever ability to perform predictive and financial analysis on transitioning from physical to virtual and cloud infrastructure.

More details on the new module and its capabilities will be announced and showcased on August 29^th at VMworld 2011, The Venetian and The Wynn, Las Vegas. Visit booth #352 during VMworld to see a demo and receive more information, August 29 – September 1, 2011.

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.

The delivery of IT services is moving from IT as a cost center to IT as a service.  Enterprises are looking for flexibility to meet increasing demand, while not exceeding power capacity or budgets.  A common question arises: How much does it actually cost to run each of my services?  Which systems are performing real work for the business, and which are simply sitting idle?

This week, Sentilla is introducing application tracking, a unique feature that correlates workload with energy consumption and cost.  With Sentilla Energy Manager, customers can track where applications are running, how much useful work they're performing, and the amount of energy and cost required to run these services.  By integrating workload measurements with energy and cost data for the first time, IT organizations are now empowered to strategically plan for future data center needs with real ground truth data and real business cases.

What's the value of application tracking?  It helps you answer these questions:

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.

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.

When I attended the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum last October, there was a pervasive excitement for a bright future---ballasted by so-called Green Jobs. The keynote speaker Van Jones, as well as a number of other speakers in the forum, spoke of the new "Green-Collar economy," in which unemployment is all but eliminated since everyone is going to be retro-fitting old buildings, inventing new technologies, and analyzing energy consumption.

At the polar opposite of the spectrum, we have some members of congress who have recently commented on such green jobs, calling them "artificial." The crux of their argument is that proponents of green jobs are trying to create jobs out of thin air, where labor is not really needed, under a thin guise of environmental responsibility.

The 451 Group has named Sentilla a "Supplier to Watch" in their recent DCIM report by Andy Lawrence and John Stanley.  We are honored for 451 to recognize Sentilla's leadership in data center analytics software, including energy management and performance optimization.  The 451 Group includes Tier 1 Research, The Info Pro, and the Uptime Institute.

According to the 451 Group report, "Sentilla’s Energy Manager actually focuses on more than energy – it covers environmental data collection and reporting. It also reads IT utilization data, enabling it to model and identify opportunities to reduce waste in space, cooling and power, and to spot underutilized IT capacity. The company is well connected and innovative."

"As datacenters become bigger, denser and more complex, it is clear that the most adaptable, economically sustainable and eco-efficient facilities will be those using advanced infrastructure management software. The three main drivers of investment in DCIM software are economics – mainly through energy-related cost savings – improved availability, and improved manageability and flexibility," said Andy Lawrence, Research Director with The 451 Group.

In the process of releasing application tracking in Sentilla Energy Manager, we had some great discussions with Dave Cappuccio and Rakesh Kumar.  Our conversations turned to "How do you measure efficiency in the data center?"  Of course, we all argue that PUE is not the right metric for determining the efficiency of a data center.  Instead, there needs to be more metrics around the applications, their workload, and the overhead they incur.  These metrics are at the core of the new application tracking release of Sentilla Energy Manager.

"The new efficiency metric for data centers is compute per kilowatt," said David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for the infrastructure teams, Gartner. "Application energy and cost information is becoming critical for enterprises concerned with optimizing their infrastructures. IT organizations armed with this information will increase their adoption of virtualization and realize energy savings and consolidation benefits more quickly."

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Over the last few months, I've had the pleasure of getting to know the team at SAP. What has been interesting in working with SAP is the wealth of products and business intelligence that they bring to the table, not to mention their diversity. With a tremendous presence in Europe as well as the US, they really have a global look at how enterprises are dealing with sustainability. SAP's acquisition of Clear Standards last year enhanced their portfolio with a carbon and financial management solution (renamed to SAP Carbon Impact). It is still an emerging market, and there's a number of players to watch (Hara, ENXSuite, and C3 just to name a few).

Kevin O'Marah from AMR Research claims that Green IT receives a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other green initiatives.  His blog has stirred some discussion in the office and here I'm weighing in on the topic.  Understandably, Kevin's post was likely intended to stir up discussion, so I realize I'm playing into what the blog was likely designed to accomplish.  (Oh, and try googling "carbon accounting" if you want to catch the hype curve.)