Sentinel Insights

New Jersey’s Best Kept Secret: Low-Cost Power
New Jersey’s Best Kept Secret: Low-Cost Power

New Jersey is often perceived to be a high power cost location relative to mid-Atlantic locations such as Northern Virginia. While historically this notion was rooted in fact, massive structural changes in the market for natural gas commencing in 2008 have…

Uncovering the Benefits of Modular Chiller Plants
Uncovering the Benefits of Modular Chiller Plants

Modular chiller plants can provide some surprisingly significant benefits to a data center’s operation. Similar to “stick built” plants, modular designed chiller plants can be specified by the MEP design engineers and the data center owner/operator with similar equipment. As…

Data Center Uptime: The Devil’s in the Details
Data Center Uptime: The Devil’s in the Details

Winter Storm Jonas pounded the east coast this past weekend with up to three feet of snow and 60-80 mile per hour winds. Widespread power outages affected a large swath of the area with hundreds of thousands impacted in North…

Overbuilt & Overbought?: Current Trends in Data Center Provisioning
Overbuilt & Overbought?: Current Trends in Data Center Provisioning

Sentinel’s Co-Founder Josh Rabina presented his keynote presentation “Overbuilt & Overbought” at NANOG 65 in Montreal, Canada. The presentation touched upon on the current data center trends as they relate to multi-tier deployments and how overprovisioning has become one of…

The Elephant in the Room: Quantifying the Value of Data Center Flexibility
The Elephant in the Room: Quantifying the Value of Data Center Flexibility

Among the most important inputs into a data center TCO analysis is a data center capacity demand forecast, ideally measured in kilowatts. Yet accurately forecasting data center capacity requirements beyond a 12-24 month horizon is virtually impossible. So what happens…

Cobbler a la Mode – North Carolina’s Delicious New Data Center Incentive Program
Cobbler a la Mode – North Carolina’s Delicious New Data Center Incentive Program

Not surprisingly, the recent passage of North Carolina’s highly attractive data center tax incentives bill has prompted renewed attention to the state as an optimal locale for data center development. But the reality is, the climate in N.C. has been…

A Place of Your Own: “Wholesale Colocation” Defined
A Place of Your Own: “Wholesale Colocation” Defined

Imagine if someone had offered you the following proposition back in your early 20s: swap your roommate-filled studio apartment for a luxury custom home and save on monthly rent. Too good to be true, right? We believe that for large…

[Infographic] 5 Key Data Center Due Diligence Strategies
[Infographic] 5 Key Data Center Due Diligence Strategies
IT vs. Facilities: Beware of the “Streetlight Effect” in Data Center Due Diligence
IT vs. Facilities: Beware of the “Streetlight Effect” in Data Center Due Diligence

While the cultural divide between IT and Facilities teams has been gradually closing, it is far from entirely gone. With respect to data center and colocation procurement, this cultural divide can, at times, undermine good decision making. In order to…