Green IT on Ulitzer

Sentilla Corporation has come up with the first software-only real-time way to track the power utilization of every single asset in a data center from the switchgear down to each and every server, storage and networking device, be they metered or unmetered.

CEO Bob Davis says, “In ongoing conversations with CIOs and IT managers we’ve repeatedly heard that tackling the issue of energy use in the data center is a top five priority for 2010. The challenge they face in getting started is the lack of visibility into energy use by unmetered equipment.”

Well, no wonder. According to Gartner most widgets in a data center from the server on down are unmetered, which makes Sentilla’s achievement is something of a breakthrough.

The start-up used to depend on sensors but has tossed that technique for an Inference Engine that can clock the power consumption of all assets every five seconds and only be off maybe 2%. It measures the power at the plug and the workloads on machines.

Sentilla calls the Inference Engine a first-of-its-kind and says it provides the first consolidated view of where, when and why energy is used.

That means that Sentilla’s customers can now track, predict and manage the energy use of every single piece of equipment in their data centers and treat power like any other asset. It should make for improved performance and efficiency, reduced downtime and better planning for expansion or consolidation.

The newly enhanced Sentilla Energy Manager 3.0, which reportedly scales to support the largest data center environments in real-time, also has more comprehensive reporting functionality with more cost control and chargeback options.

The widgetry will run $100 a year per device when it starts shipping the first of next month.

Sentilla has been talking to the management folks, your usual suspects HP, IBM, CA and BMC.