In recent years, data center operators and enterprise executives have given power consumption a lot of attention. Major problems are excessive power consumption, too much heat generated by IT and facilities equipment, and space requirements. Several cures have been suggested. AltaTerra put together a comprehensive research report on the greening of data centers.
One way to tackle the heavy power consumption problem at data centers is to start monitoring and measuring the power usage there. People cannot understand what they cannot see. Without monitoring and measuring, you cannot see how much power is used when and where and how. I hate to repeat the well-known adage “you can’t control what you can’t measure,” but that is really true.
Recently, I visited the Redwood City headquarters of Sentilla. The company develops and markets solutions for monitoring and measuring power consumption at data centers and industrial buildings.
Sentilla’s Headquarters in Redwood City
My questions focused on:
Who they are
What their differentiations are
Where they are going
Bob Davis, CEO, a former senior vice president at CA and a veteran of several startups, answered my questions.
Sentilla’s CEO Bob Davis
Who They Are Sentilla was founded in 2003 and started monitoring the power consumption of industrial buildings. They got funded in 2006 and entered the data center energy efficiency segment in 2008. They are headquartered in a building in front of the Redwood City Caltrain station and have a branch in the U.K. The European Union, especially the U.K., has more severe environmental laws (such as CRC) than the U.S., and power is more expensive in the U.K. than in the U.S. So the U.K. branch makes sense, with a tail wind (like CRC) to capture the market with little competition.
Remember that there are two kinds of measuring and monitoring companies. One kind installs its own sensors, collects/aggregates data, and displays the result. The other kind does not deploy its own sensors but aggregates data and displays the result. Sentilla is a hybrid of the two. It collects information readily available from the following sources to visualize the power consumption at data centers:
System software
EMS (enterprise management system)
Service operations
IT equipment
Facilities equipment
The data are collected more or less at each rack level. But if you need more detailed monitoring for each piece of equipment, they sell three kinds of hardware for monitoring:
Wireless PAU (power analysis unit)—attaches to each piece of equipment
Wireless gateway—aggregates data collected by PAUs
Appliance to mount a web-based user interface (UI)—runs on Linux
The third kind is optional, and they can install their UI software on a customer’s Linux box. Their first customer shipment was January of this year, and they are working with multiple customers.
Their UI example is given here.
Three servers’ power consumption information display with power cost and GHG emission information
Differentiation Two more people joined the conversation on some technical details.
From right, Bob Davis, Taryn Irulegui (director of market programs), and David Williams (head of engineering)
In my report, I covered several companies in this segment. At 30,000 feet high, it is not easy to see the differences among those companies and what matters most.
Davis emphasized their software architecture and design. Their software is written in Java whether it is in the appliance, embedded PAUs, or gateways. Because of the design, it scales nicely. Currently, their software deals with hundreds of nodes, but towards the end of the year, it will be able to deal with thousands of nodes. And in the future, it should be able to handle tens of thousands of nodes. I was wondering if configuring the UI to receive data from multiple sources takes a lot of time. Most professionally run data centers keep their equipment information in a CMDB (configuration management database) and/or an LDAP database, and it is straightforward to set this up. On the average, the most it takes is one or two days without service interruption.
Another point is its IT-centric view as compared with the facilities-centric view of others. The best way to reduce power consumption is to save power consumption on IT equipment. For that, the IT-centric view is useful.
Future Directions As a researcher, I have a tendency to foresee the future beyond the current market. Sometimes this is good, but often I get criticized for being too much ahead of the market. My current thinking is that the market will follow this sequence:
Mitigation with power consumption
Mitigation with energy consumption (power and energy are not the same from my point of view)
Carbon footprint awareness
Renewable energy
Smart grid
Of course, this is just my view, and the reality is not this simple. Different people work on different segments at a given time. The discussion with the Sentilla folks made me realize that companies like Google and Microsoft can afford brand-new data centers with their bleeding-edge technologies to run most energy efficiently, but most existing data centers are not equipped with any tool to visualize power usage. Sales is never easy, but with logistics taken care of, Sentilla’s sales pitch is straightforward because the ROI is very clear and can be visualized.
For several more years, this segment will stay independent and will be alive and kicking. But over time, Sentilla needs to team up with other management tool companies like CA (Unicenter), HP (OpenView), IBM (Tivoli), and BMC (Patrol) to provide a wider scope of management capabilities.
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