The focus on reducing the data center's energy consumption gets more granular each day. Back in the 1990s we in the computer industry were infatuated with studying megahertz speeds, bus bandwidth and memory architectures to squeeze every last iota of performance out of a computer.

Now it's not the processing power, but the power going into computing equipment that is being painstakingly scrutinized, as rising energy costs are becoming the data center manager's nemesis. According to a Gartner Group study data center energy costs could rise by 1600 percent by 2025, as reported by EcoWorldly.

Energy management company Sentilla today announced the Sentilla Data Manager, a package including wireless microprocessors and server software that tracks each computing device's energy draw. Sentilla's system includes a power brick-sized device containing sensors and embedded microprocessors that sits between the box and the outlet and wirelessly transmits the data to a server appliance that processes the information.

Managing a data center is becoming more and more about watching energy costs, which often outweigh the cost of labor and the equipment. The Data Manager can be used to determine when devices are starting to gobble power as they get older and need to be replaced or resourced reallocated, according to Sentilla CEO Bob Davis. "For storage arrays, efficiency decays over time, and some may begin to require more power for the same activity," Davis says.

By capturing and analyzing the power consumption data, IT professionals can even tell when to add more memory to a server if frequently accessing the storage devices significantly impacts the energy cost. The software can also be used to compare the energy efficiency of different vendors' servers.

When purchased in volume (1000 or more devices) Sentilla's system costs about $100 per server, not an insignificant sum. But with data centers' energy bills often in the millions per year, the return on investment can be a year or less, Davis says. Since the product is new he doesn't have any firm data on energy savings, but he estimates it will be in the "10s of percents."

Sun Microsystems has been beta testing the product, which is only available for the Linux platform today.

Davis says the sensor technology was developed by the University at California, Berkeley, while the energy management component was first used to track the power in an aluminum smelting plant.