Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Sentilla raises $15M to supercharge data center management

IT infrastructure software maker Sentilla wants to turn IT departments into profit centers instead of financial burdens, and they’ve just raised?$15 million to work towards that goal.

Sentilla’s software uses physical equipment and virtual cloud IT?infrastructure?to improve data center efficiency by discovering, monitoring, analyzing, planing and automatting data center workloads. Sentilla’s energy management platform is currently in its sixth generation.?Sentilla’s service is subscription-based and the company says it currently helps customers reclaim around 18 to 20 percent of their power capacity.

If the terms “IT infrastructure” and “IT department” have the tendency to make your eyes glaze-over, this might make you sit up: Sentilla has patent-pending Virtual Meters that compute the power consumption of unmetered assets. These meters perform “what-if” analysis to predict future performance and then track application?performance?in both virtual and dedicated environments. This information has been hard to track?historically, making these meters very valuable.

“We’re leading the charge to turn IT upside down and deliver more services using less resources,” said Mike Kaul, CEO of Sentilla, in today’s press release. “Sentilla is the only company that can provide the diagnostic insight to drastically reduce data center costs AND increase company revenue as well as profitability. This funding is a validation of what we’ve been seeing in the market and hearing from our valued customers, and provides us with the resources to accommodate growing demand.”

Today’s financing round is lead by SingTel Innov8 Ventures with participation from Sentilla’s existing backers ONSET Ventures and Claremont Creek Ventures. Founded in 2003, this is the company’s third round of institutional funding. They have raised a total of $26.3 million.?Sentilla will use today’s funding for “sales and marketing expansion.” The company is headquartered in Redwood City, CA with a branch in London.

Sentilla competes with?Power Assure,?Modius,?VMWare?and?SynapSense?(used by Facebook).?HP recently jumped into the game?with a “Discovery and Dependency Mapping Service for Data Center Transformation.” Besides the Virtual Meters, what sets Sentilla apart is the company’s experienced team.?CEO Kaul has an impressive resume. A former United States Air Force pilot, he has more than 20 years of experience in software. Before Sentilla, Kaul was president and CEO of diCarta. Prior to that he was Charman of BuildPoint, after being CEO of HotDispatch, and the former VP and GM of Oracle’s New Technologies devision.

Sentilla has won the Cool Vendor award from Gartner in data center infrastructure management. The company was also included in GigaOM’s Structure 50 list of the top cloud computing and infrastructure companies. The company was co-founded by CTO Joe Polastre who was featured in?the 2009 Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal 40 Under 40 award and named one of BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs. Polastre has held software development and product manager positions with IBM, Microsoft and Intel.

Sentilla will be showcasing its cloud analytics tool at VMworld in Las Vegas, starting August 29. You can read more about the tool on the company’s blog.

(image courtesy?wiki.engr.illinois.edu)

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Tags: data centers

Companies: Sentilla


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