Start-Up's Profile: Sentilla

Headquarters
Redwood City, CA (and EMEA office in Reading, UK)

Born in
2003

Number of employees
24

Number of customers
8

Funding
$6 million in 2006 and $7.5 million in January 2009 from investors ONSET Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures

Executives

Bob Davis, CEO, previously senior VP and GM of the storage business unit at CA where he arrives through the acquisition of Netreon;
Joe Polastre, co-founder and CTO, held software development and product manager positions with IBM, Microsoft and Intel;
Eddie White, senior VP of business development, formerly served as VP of WW business development at CA, in charge of key strategic alliances across the storage and data center management businesses, after stints at Adaptec and Eurologic;
Doug Engledow, VP of WW sales, most recently leading the mid-market business unit for CA as its VP, WW partner enablement, and previously at 3Par, Veritas, Sun and DEC;
Cory Sharp and Rob Szewczyk are young students, co-founders and principal architects of the core design of Sentilla’s software platform;
Alan Wallman, EMEA MD, coming from Emulex.

Technology
The relatively old start-up moved in IT environment at the beginning of the year, being formerly involved in software based on Java for industry applications. Sentilla launched its patent-pending energy management technology in May 2008. Its new offering is named Sentilla Energy Manager, a software providing detailed analysis of the power profile of a data center. In a way, it’s like a SRM for power management. Through standard web interfaces, on the screen, you can get in real time the power consumption of each pieces of hardware including servers and storage systems as well as the total consumed to take decisions for efficiently managing. Here the problem is to get the information of the power consumption of each device. You can get it directly for some of them as it is included in software of some companies or into to devices following the SMI-S specs. For the other ones, Sentilla sells a small black box, called Power Analysis Unit (see figure below), plugged to an electric outlet on one side and to the hardware device on the other one. This box calculates the consumption of the device and transfer this information to the software via a Wifi connexion. Price of Sentilla Energy Manager starts at $25,000.

sentilla