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Data Center Capacity Planning and the CIO’s Agenda

Eddie White — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:09:34 -0500

Data Center Capacity Planning and the CIO’s Agenda

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.

2011 Cool Vendor Sentilla to Reveal Best Practices for Maximizing Data Center Efficiency at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Anna Luo — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:16:08 -0400

2011 Cool Vendor Sentilla to Reveal Best Practices for Maximizing Data Center Efficiency at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

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!

Sneak Peak: Announcing Sentilla Analytics for Cloud at VMworld

Joe Polastre — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:21:28 -0400

Sneak Peak: Announcing Sentilla Analytics for Cloud at VMworld

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.

Data Center Power Consumption Grows by 56%

Joe Polastre — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:16:58 -0400

Data Center Power Consumption Grows by 56%

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:

451 Group Names Sentilla 'Supplier to Watch'

Joe Polastre — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:49:11 -0400

451 Group Names Sentilla 'Supplier to Watch'

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.

Energy Drives Business Agility with Increased Elasticity of Data Center Infrastructure

Eddie White — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:04:15 -0400

Energy Drives Business Agility with Increased Elasticity of Data Center Infrastructure

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.

Reflecting on Uptime Institute Symposium: Call to Action

Joe Polastre — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:16:17 -0400

Reflecting on Uptime Institute Symposium: Call to Action

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.

Green IT – May not lead to Black Numbers and could make your CEO see Red

Eddie White — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:01:25 -0400

Green IT – May not lead to Black Numbers and could make your CEO see Red

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.

Virtualization – Steps to Success on the Journey

Eddie White — Sun, 22 May 2011 13:40:52 -0400

Virtualization – Steps to Success on the Journey

As a data center executive or operational manager you have successfully started and completed your first phase of virtualization and are possibly planning your next deployment. You have quickly and fairly easily taken your virtual footprint from 0% to 20%+. You have met your 2010 objectives, got paid on your MBO’s and have been showcasing your success internally and externally. And at the same time you are planning for the next phases in 2011 and 2012.

With the low hanging fruit gone, the next steps are not so obvious. The ROI is not so clear, and you are also looking outside the realm of your IT world – specifically the services and resources of the business – as the next candidates for virtualization. Will the business units be skeptical about your proposals and challenge your metrics against their reality?

As you plan for your next phase of virtualization, this will be foremost in your mind. As the IT leader you will want to take your team along a virtualization journey to the cloud, deliver value to your business customers in terms of business agility and validate each step of this process. You will face some challenges to this part of the virtualization process. The business will want to see that this is more than an “IT project”, and you will have to meet the business needs as you virtualize.

Will Carbon Regulation Affect the Data Center?

Joe Polastre — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:41:15 -0500

Will Carbon Regulation Affect the Data Center?

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.