December 5, 2011 source: Greentech Media
Claremont Creek Ventures portfolio company Sentilla, launched a software suite today that promises to help customers plan their data center needs . We are excited with the traction Sentilla is getting in the market and this greentech article captures the essence of this announcement well.
Sentilla Targets Business Beyond Data Center Efficiency
Sentilla wants to move from data center efficiency to data center planning.
Sentilla, one of the many startups with technology to help data centers measure their energy use, is making a push to become the go-to technology provider to help customers manage this issue for the long haul.
That's the idea behind Monday's launch of Sentilla 4.0, a software suite that promises to help customers plan their data center needs — be they hosted on-site or based in the cloud — on a host of variables including energy use, hardware and software costs and space and power constraints.
It's a logical next step for Sentilla, one of a host of startups and IT giants with technology to optimize data center operational efficiency through a combination of sensor data and software analytics. Once you've gotten your existing data centers to run at high efficiency with those tools, the next step is to translate it into the kind of data CTOs need in order to decide how to spend limited IT budgets to build new ones.
“Think of it like ERP [enterprise resource planning] in the manufacturing space,” said Sentilla CTO Joe Polastre. “This is resource planning for the data center.”
- Financial planning. Sentilla says its software can benchmark the cost of a company's current data center operations, then predict the costs involved in virtualizing it or moving it to a private or public cloud infrastructure.
- Infrastructure planning. Sentilla says it can evaluate potential hardware refresh plans and other infrastructure projects before they're implemented, as well as figure out when an existing data center runs out of capacity.
- Asset analysis. This predictive tool is aimed at identifying potential efficiency projects within data center operations, and then figuring out how those potential projects fit within a customer's existing business and infrastructure plans.
These are the kinds of things that companies typically manage today as big consulting projects, spending months revising spreadsheets and rechecking variables, Polastre said. “Our perspective is, IT people are intelligent, well-paid people,” he said. “They probably shouldn't spend their time messing around with spreadsheets.”
Read the full article and comments at Greentech Enterprise