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Sentilla thinks of data centers, as data factories!

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Data center

If you have been following this blog, you’ll know I have been profiling Data Center efficiency companies over the last few weeks. This week I take a look at Sentilla.

I talked to Sentilla’s CTO and co-founder, Joe Polastre, the other day and Joe told me that Sentilla came out of Berkeley where they had been looking at data analytics problems around large, potentially incomplete or inaccurate, streaming datasets. The challenge was how to turn that into a complete picture of what’s going on so people could make business decisions.

Sentilla takes an industrial manufacturing approach to Data Centers – in manufacturing you have power going in one side, and products and (often) waste heat coming out the other. In the same way in data centers you have power going in one side and coming out the other side you have the product (compute cycles) and waste heat. To optimise your data center you need to get the maximum data/compute (product) output with the minimum power in and the least waste heat generated. Sentilla thinks of data centers, as data factories!

Unlike most of the data center people I have talked to, Sentilla don’t talk so much about energy savings. Instead they emphasise maximising performance – getting the most out of your existing data centers, your existing storage, your existing servers, your existing power supply. By far the greatest saving from deploying Sentilla, Joe claimed, is not from the energy savings. That pales in comparison to the capital deferment savings gained from being able to delay the building of extra data center facilities by however many years, he said.

So how does Sentilla help?

Well Sentilla analyses the energy profile of every asset in the data center, whether metered or not, and makes recommendations to improve the planning and management of data center operations. I highlighted the “whether metered or not” bit because this is an important differentiator for Sentilla – they have developed and patented what they call “virtual meters”. These are algorithms which look at the work that a device is doing, and based on models which Sentilla have built up, and measurements they have done, as well as some benchmarks which are out there, Sentilla computes how much power is being used by that equipment.

The reason this is so important is because the most inefficient equipment in the data center is not the new stuff (which is likely to already be metered) but the legacy devices. These are the ones which need to be most carefully managed, and the ones where the greatest performance gains for the data center can be made. And because Sentilla can pull usage information from management databases like Tivoli, it means the Sentilla doesn’t need to poll every piece of equipment in the data center (with the increased network traffic and data that would generate).

Also, because Sentilla has its virtual meters, it is a software-only product and can therefore be rolled out very quickly.

The other nice feature Sentilla has is that it can identify the energy utilisation of virtualised servers. This is important because with the increasing ease of deployment of virtual servers, under-utilised VM’s and VM clutter are starting to become issues for data centers. VM clutter isn’t just an issue for energy reasons – there are also implications for software licensing, maintenance and SLA requirements.

I asked Joe about whether Sentilla is a SaaS product and he said that while they have a SaaS version of the product, so far most of Sentilla’s clients prefer to keep their data in-house and they haven’t gone for the SaaS option.

Finally I asked about pricing and Joe said that Sentilla is priced on a subscription basis and, apparently, it is priced such that for any modest sized data center, for every $1 you put into Sentilla, you get $2 back. Or put another way, Joe said, deploying Sentilla will generally mean that you reclaim around 18-20% of your power capacity.

Disclosure: Sentilla are a client (but this post is not part of their client engagement)

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Photo credit The Planet

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Power Assure automates the reduction of data center power consumption

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Data centre

If you’ve been following this blog in the last couple of weeks you’ll have noticed that I have profiled a couple of data centre energy management companies – well, today it is the turn of Power Assure.

The last time I talked to Power Assure was two years ago and they were still very early stage. At that time I talked to co-founder and CTO, Clemens Pfeiffer, this time I spoke with Power Assure’s President and CEO, Brad Wurtz.

The spin that Power Assure put on their energy management software is that, not only do they offer their Dynamic Power Management solution which provides realtime monitoring and analytics of power consumption across multiple sites, but their Dynamic Power Optimization application automatically reduces power consumption.

How does it do that?

Well, according to Brad, clients put an appliance in each of the data centres they are interested in optimising (Power Assure’s target customer base are large organisations with multiple data centres – government, financial services, healthcare, insurance, telco’s, etc.). The appliance uses the management network to gather data – data may come from devices (servers, PDU’s, UPS’s, chillers, etc.) directly, or more frequently, it gathers data directly from multiple existing databases (i.e. a Tivoli db, a BMS, an existing power monitoring system, and/or inventory system) and performs Data Centre analytics on those data.

Data centre

The optimisation module links into existing system management software to measures and track energy demand on a per applications basis in realtime. It then calculates the amount of compute capacity required to meet the service level agreements of that application and adds a little bit of headroom. From the compute it knows the number of servers needed, so it communicates with the load balancer (or hypervisor, depending on the data centre’s infrastructure) and adjusts the size of the server pool to meet the required demand.

Servers removed from the pool can be either power capped or put in sleep mode. As demand increases the servers can be brought fully online and the load balancer re-balanced so the enlarged pool can meet the new level of demand. This is the opposite of the smart grid demand response concept – this is supply-side management – matching your energy consumption (supply to the demand for compute resources).

A partnership with Intel means that future versions will be able to turn off and on individual components or cores to more precisely control power usage.

The software is agentless and interestingly, given the customer profile Brad outlined (pharmas, financial institutions, governments, etc.), customers log in to view and manage their power consumption data because it is SaaS delivered.

The two case studies on their site make for interesting reading and show reductions in power consumption from 56% – 68% which are not to be sneezed at.

The one client referred to in the call is NASA and Power Assure are involved in a data centre consolidation program with them. Based on the work they have done with Power Assure, Brad informed me that NASA now expects to be able to consolidate their current 75 Data Centres significantly. That’ll make a fascinating case study!

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Photo credit cbowns

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Power line communications now being used in more and more scenarios

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Power Line Communications

I had a nice catch-up call with Mike Holt the other day – Mike is Semitech Semiconductor’s VP Sales and Marketing and we had previously talked last August.

Mike was bringing me up to speed on what has been going on with Semitech in the last five months. Semitech make semiconductor chips specially designed for power line communications (PLC). Power line communications is essentially the use of electrical cables to transmit data.

Power line communications is receiving a lot of interest these days because of the current buzz (bad pun, sorry) around Smart Grids. Every smart meter is, by definition, connected to an electricity distribution network – if this network can be used to send and receive information, it saves having to roll out a separate infrastructure for your smart grid communications.

During our call, Mike made me aware of a number of bits of Semitech news (they’ve expanded their sales team, they had new product announcements and they closed a new funding round) but by far the more interesting part of the chat, for me, was when Mike started to tell me of the new markets that are expressing an interest in PLC.

According to Mike, there is now a growing interest in PLC coming from the urban lighting sector to help with maintenance and control of lighting. Mike gave me the example of Munich. Apparently there are five people employed in the city whose job it is to drive around the city at night spotting burnt out lights – with a PLC solution, you can receive an automatic notification as soon as your sodium lamps burn out and you get early indications that an LED is about to burn out allowing you to switch it out before it goes dark.

LED’s by themselves save large amounts of money (this is very important when urban lighting makes up to 40% of a cities energy budget) but, as we reported last year, LED’s when they are connected to an intelligent control system can save up to 87% on energy costs!

Other new markets for power line communications Mike mentioned were for remote management of solar panels on remote solar farms and seemingly there is a growing interest in PLC in the home automation field – which makes a lot of sense too.

Power line communications is not without its challenges – electrical networks can be ‘noisy’ and be prone to attenuation but as companies like Semitech become better at dealing with those issues, it is going to be fascinating to see just where PLC takes us.

Photo credit Ruud Hein

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1E update NightWatchman to v6

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1E have released a significant update to NightWatchman, their computer energy saving software.

I have written about 1E and their NightWatchman energy saving software several times previously but because of the update, I thought them worth another post.

First a bit of background – NightWatchman is an application which allows system administrators managing computers to also manage and reduce their energy use. It does this by powering down computers remotely and automatically overnight and at weekends, thereby reducing their energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Ford has already announced that it is saving over $1 million per annum having rolled out NightWatchman.

So, what have they added to the application in version 6?

  1. well, they have added a web-based, configurable, enterprise dashboard to give a high level view of power use and energy savings across an organisation
  2. they also added location-based energy tariffs specific to geography and utility to make for more accurate reporting
  3. they beefed up the sleepless client detection to shut down safely machines which are resisting being shut down
  4. they added multi-lingual support (French and German for now, with Spanish in the works) and
  5. they have a native Mac client allowing control of computers, be they Windows or Mac based, from within a single console

1E have a stellar client list, a very simple proposition (we’ll help you manage turning off & on your computers to help save energy) and they have just significantly improved the product – what’s not to like?

And before I forget, the other news that 1E are announcing is their latest client, the insurance group Aviva, is rolling out NightWatchman across their 30,000 UK-based PCs – nice win for 1E!

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Digital Lumens intelligent LEDs cut Maines energy for lighting by 87%

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Digital Lumens and Maines Before and after
Photo of before and after installation of Digital Lumens lighting system in Maines Paper & Food Service courtesy of Digital Lumens.


Digital Lumens reduced the cost of lighting for their first customer by 87%.

Digital Lumens specialise in high-bay lighting for warehouses, cold storage facilities, and manufacturing plants. This is a mostly invisible but very large segment. It is estimated that in the US alone, $5bn worth of lighting is sold into the supply chain sector every year.

Mike Feinstein, Digital Lumens’ VP of Sales and Marketing, told me on a recent call that they are very much a start-up company and that they have had their first revenues in this calendar year.

In a recent press release Digital Lumens reported that their first large-scale customer, Maines Paper & Food Service has reduced their energy requirements for lighting by 87% since installing the Digital Lumens lighting system. Up until now, Maines 500,000 sq ft (46,450 sq meters) warehouse was lit using sodium lights 24 x 7 and lighting costs made up around 20% of Maines total energy spend.

With the new system Maines expects to save 1,726,108kWh per year which, at a cost of US$0.0958 per kWh for industrial customers in New York, amounts to a $ saving of just over $165,000 per annum. This saving, combined with an incentive provided by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), means that Maines will recoup the cost of this project in less than a year!

I was fascinated with this story so I spoke to Pat DeOrdio, the VP of Operations for Maines.

Pat told me that Maines were doing a full analysis of their lighting to see how “we could reduce our kW off the grid and help with our Green initiatives” when they came across the Digital Lumens solution.

For Pat, what was particularly compelling about the intelligent lighting system was the management software which came with it

“With Digital Lumen’s lights, every one of them is like a little computer. It has its own IP address so we are able to control that lighting level – if we want to have the light turn off in 30 seconds, 60 seconds or when nobody’s in the aisle, you know, why do you want it lit? It gives us the ability to control the light level from a computer and it reduces our energy cost”

Of course another big advantage of the LED lights is the fact that they give out so much less heat. This is particularly important in large cold rooms and freezers because it reduces the workload on the chillers cooling the rooms

Three other big advantages Pat cited to the Digital Lumens’ solution were that:

  1. They allowed lights to be turned down to a ‘nightlight mode’ – 10% light. This was important in the large warehouse setting for worker safety.
  2. The total flexibility of the system means that, in Pat’s words “as we get used to it, maybe we’ll only turn the light up to 80%, cos that’s all the light level we’ll need” – allowing for further savings and
  3. The colour of the light is much brighter now so the produce they are stocking even looks better!

LED lighting is making huge strides now in commercial settings. When the Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wis., was considering how to light its new factory, it decided to go with LED’s. From the New York Times report on the building:

By lighting all of the building?s exterior and most of its interior with L.E.D.?s, Sentry spent $12,000 more than the $6,000 needed to light the facility with a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. But using L.E.D.?s, the company is saving $7,000 a year in energy costs, will not need to change a bulb for 20 years and will recoup its additional investment in less than two years.

Kaj den Daas, chairman and chief executive of Philips Lighting, one of the largest manufacturers of lighting globally, in an interview two years ago said ?We are not spending one dollar on research and development for compact fluorescents.? Instead, the bulk of its R.& D. budget, which is 5.2 percent of the company?s global lighting revenue, is for L.E.D. research. Philips is betting the store on the L.E.D. bulbs, which it expects to represent 20 percent of its professional lighting revenue in two years.

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British Gas launch version 2 of their iPhone app – nice but non-inclusive!

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British Gas iPhone app

British Gas announced recently that they had updated their iPhone app to version 2.

The original application, which was downloaded over 100,000 times, helped customers monitor energy use and submit meter readings to avoid estimated bills. In June alone over 18,000 meter readings were submitted using the app.

With the new version customers can

  • view their account balance
  • see their last bill amount
  • check when payment is due and
  • view graphs of their personal energy consumption of the past 24 months
British Gas iPhone app - electricity

British Gas iPhone app - electricity

Benjamin Braun, Head of Online Services, at British Gas said:

More customers already contact us over the web than by telephone and with these new features, we expect that our App will quickly become the main way that many of our iPhone customers will manage their British Gas account.

When I read this I wondered why, if more people are contacting British Gas over the web than by phone, they decided to develop an application for the iPhone. Why not a mobile site which works across all devices. I reached out to their spokesperson David Outhwaite and I asked him if there were plans to develop a similar app for competing platforms like Android or better yet a mobile website which would work across all platforms.

David replied that

Our focus has been the iphone as that is the device from which we receive the vast majority of contact to our website. No current plans [to develop for other platforms]

The fact that this application has been so successful for British Gas shows that people have an appetite for interacting with their energy related information. Consequently, I found David’s response very disappointing.

Although I do own an iPhone, and I like what British Gas are doing with this app, I feel they are doing their non-iPhone owning customers a huge disservice by not providing them with similar functionality. Especially when you consider that the iPhone OS only commands 14% of the mobile operating system market share, what about the other 86% of British Gas’ customers?

It wouldn’t be hard to develop a mobile site which served iPhones, Android devices, and other smartphones equally well.

Hopefully British Gas will have a change of heart and produce a more inclusive mobile site soon.

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NightWatchman Server Edition v2.0 helps tackle virtual server sprawl

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Grassy server room!

Photo via Tom Raftery

In a bid to help companies tackle server sprawl, 1E launched v2.0 of its NightWatchman Server Edition yesterday.

1E’s NightWatchman software comes in two flavours – the desktop edition to allow for central administration of the power management of laptops and desktops (including Macs) and the server edition.

The power consumption of desktop computers, which are often only used 8 hours a day, (and may need to be woken up once a month at 3am for an update) is relatively straightforward to manage. On the other hand, the power management of servers is quite a bit more complex. Servers are, by definition supposed to be accessible at all times, so you can’t shut them down, right?

Well, yes and no.

Not all servers are equal. Up to 15% of servers globally are powered on, and simply doing nothing. This equates to roughly $140 billion in power costs and produces 80 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Nightwatchman helps in a number of ways. First, its agent-based software quickly identifies servers whose CPU utilisation is is simply associated with its own management and maintenance processes (i.e. the server is unused). These servers can be decomissioned or repurposed.

NightWatchman goes further though and it uses its Drowsy Server technology to dynamically drop CPU and fan speeds on servers when they are not under pressure, and ramp them back up once more as soon as the server starts to be used. 1E estimates an average 12% energy savings per server due to Drowsy Server alone.

This latest release of NightWatchman Server Edition addresses virtualisation and virtual server sprawl.

Because virtualisation software vendors have made virtualisation such a trivial task there is now a growing issue of virtual server sprawl. NightWatchman v2.0 can now identify unused virtual servers to allow for them to be deleted or put to work freeing up server resources (and software licenses!).

Even more interesting though, is that 1E are publishing in the Customer Spotlight section of their blog, a series of posts from CSC detailing the journey of installing and using NightWatchman Server Edition within CSC to reduce energy consumption.

It is one thing to hear from the vendor just how good their product is. It is another thing completely to have someone like CSC detail the rollout of the software across their North American server infrastructure. This is a blog I will be following with interest.

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Current Cost energy meter reviewed

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CurrentCost Envi Energy Meter

Photo credit Tom Raftery

I emailed Chris Dalby of Current Cost a question about their devices a few weeks ago. Chris, not only answered my question but also offered to send me one of their energy monitors to try for myself!

I love my Current Cost Envi 128. It is incredibly straightforward to setup – even I could do it, despite living in an apartment complex with no access to the electricity meter. I had mine up and running within minutes of receiving the delivery (I attached the clamp to the wire going into the fuseboard)!

One of the really great things about the Current Cost energy meters is that they can be connected to a computer. This may not sound like a big deal but it means you can use software from the downloads page to chart your energy usage in real-time as well as for storing historical data. This allows for fascinating comparisons of energy use across different scenarios.

Recently Current Cost announced they were partnering with Google to allow Google’s PowerMeter software to be used with Current Cost meters.

Google PowerMeter

Google PowerMeter

The software for Google PowerMeter is available on the Current Cost site [after registration]. One disappointing aspect of the Powermeter software is that it is Windows only. Fortunately I have Windows installed (via Parallels) on my Mac so this wasn’t a major issue for me.

The biggest issue I came across with the Current Cost Envi and PowerMeter software is, if you want an accurate picture of your energy use, you need to leave your computer turned on running the PowerMeter software all the time! Obviously this is not very energy-efficient!

There is an historical data upload mode on the Envi. This allows you to upload data from the meter to the software in the case that the software wasn’t running (computer powered down, for example) but the historical data stored on the Envi is not at all granular, and worse, it overwrites the granular data which you had previously uploaded!

Current Cost say they are coming out with a Bridge device which will address this problem. Personally rather than forcing people into buying another device, I’d prefer if the software would simply not overwrite good data – that should be a simple software fix. The lack of granularity in the stored data is a tougher fix but I suspect could also be done via a software update of the Envi (while trading off the number of days’ data the Envi could store).

Apart from these niggles, I think the Current Cost energy meters are a superb way to visualise and track your energy consumption, something that is invaluable in helping to better manage your electricity usage.

I mentioned my concerns to Current Cost and asked for comment from them. As soon as they send me their comments, I will publish them here.

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Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager R3 has Power Management functionality built-in

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Microsoft recently released in Beta the R3 version of its System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

Microsoft Corporate VP Brad Anderson, introduced it at the Microsoft Management Summit 2010 saying

The most significant change to the System Center Configuration Manager in R3 is the new power management set of strategies.

By way of background Brad talked about how an increasing number of RFP’s being received by Microsoft were requesting information on what Microsoft was doing to reduce its footprint. According to Brad, reducing your energy footprint is now an imperative to doing business, not just a way of saving the company money.

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3 config screen

Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager allows systems administrators to centrally control all kinds of policies on client servers and PCs on a network. Everything from what appears in the Start menu right through to security management policies can be deployed using this software (aside – as a sysadmin of a small co. back in the early 00’s I used the config manager to set people’s wallpaper on their PCs to a html version of the co. phone book!).

The ability to control the energy policies of client PC’s is hugely important because that’s where the maximum number of CPU’s is in most organisations. The Ford Motor company, for example, recently announced that by rolling out 1E’s Nightwatchman PC energy management application it was going to save

$1.2 million and reduce its carbon footprint by 16,000-25,000 metric tons annually

1E are a Microsoft partner and their NightWatchman product goes significantly further with PC power management according to Microsoft’s Rob Reynolds, Director of Product Planning for System Center, who briefed me on the new System Center Configuration Manager (config manager will only put PC’s into Sleep Mode, for example, whereas NightWatchman can shut them down completely and NightWatchman has significant power management controls for XP clients which config manager is missing).

The new software gives you

  • The ability to see and set how and where the power is being used
  • The ability to see what your user activity looks like
  • A set of recommendations on policy to show you how to reduce your power consumption and
  • Tracking and reporting on how much carbon you have prevented from being released as a result of your power management capabilities

On the server front, Rob outlined a scenario where based on reduced demand (overnight, say), virtual machines can be re-provisioned onto fewer hosts and then some of the servers could be put into a low power state. Then as demand picks up once more (following morning) the servers in low power mode can be woken back up and the virtual machines moved back onto them.

While many products such as NightWatchman already exist with this functionality, having it built into Configuration Manager will now put this within easy reach of all Microsoft customers and that can only be a good thing.

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“The face of the Smart Grid will be paper!”

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Utility bill

Photo credit Tom Raftery

We had a briefing from a company called Opower the other day. We take lots of briefings but this one struck a different chord straight away when Ogi Kavazovic, Opower’s Sr. Director of Marketing and Strategy who was giving the briefing, said Opower is “one of the few new companies in the energy efficiency space, as distinct from the smart grid space”. A company claiming not to be in the smart grid space? How refreshing!

Opower set out, when set up three years ago to unlock the information in people’s electricity meters and came up with its first product, the Home Energy Report. This is a printed report sent to home-owners to motivate them to change their behaviour so that they reduce their energy consumption. The report is personalised, benchmarked against peers and contains targeted tips on how to reduce their consumption.

The Home Energy Report initially was rolled out to 35,000 homes but is now being delivered to over a million homes across the US (and later this year it is expected to go to up to 5 million homes). And the Home Energy Report is currently delivering savings of 2-3% per annum, year on year.

One of the interesting things about Opower is that they have been able to deliver on the notion of behaviour based energy efficiency.

Ogi made the point that people are just not interested in checking their energy information online (apart from a very few energy geeks). This leads us to an interesting point – in today’s Smart Grid ecosystem, the two primary mechanisms companies are hoping to rely on for customer engagement are the website and in-home devices. However, Ogi contends that this is flawed because people are not interested enough seek out this information.

One of Opower’s learnings from two years of doing this is that you have to push information to home owners which is why Opower went with the paper-based mail channel for delivery. This was completely counter-intuitive to me. I love digital information and shun paper-based communications. If I receive it in paper, I can’t click on it, I can’t drill down for more information but seemingly, I am in a minority!

Opower have done surveys on the recipients of their reports and found that close to 70% of the recipients have talked to their families about the reports i.e. not only have they read them and acted on them (the 2-3% reduction) but they have discussed them with their families!

Hence Ogi’s assertion that “the face of the Smart Grid will be paper” – it seems high tech meter’s primary communication interface with home-owners will be with the low tech medium that is paper, at least for the time being!