IT energy management firm nabs $7.5 million

By now we all know that data centers are energy hogs, and there’s money — as well as the planet — to be saved in reducing that consumption. That also means there’s money to be made in helping data centers find out where to cut energy use.

That’s good news for companies like Redwood City, California-based Sentilla Corp., which this week announced it’s secured $7.5 million in Series B funding to help it develop its technology and take it global.

Sentilla’s niche is pervasive computing to track energy consumption and waste. What that means is, through a combination of Java-based software and armies of small wireless sensors deployed in data centers, Sentilla has developed a way to monitor the electricity used and waste heat generated by every individual piece of IT equipment on site.

Terry Opdendyk, a general partner at ONSET Ventures, one of Sentilla’s investors, says the company is tapping the “emerging trend of the ‘Internet of Things’ — where inanimate objects of every conceivable type communicate and exchange data effortlessly through wireless networks. This is a huge long-term opportunity in energy and many other markets.”

Greentech Media reports that Sentilla’s strategy was inspired by the company’s early work monitoring energy consumption and heat loss in the aluminum smelting industry. Sentilla CEO Bob Davis told Greentech he realized the technology could just as well be applied to other energy-hogging — and more populous — sectors such as data centers.

As Davis put it, “There are only 20 aluminum plants in the world, but there are a lot of data centers.”

Plus, with IT energy consumption projected to continue ballooning in years to come, taking an energy management solution to the data center market made for brilliant business logic. With a fresh seven-and-a-half mill in its pockets, Sentilla now has the chance to test that logic on a wider global basis.