Most data rooms are kept between 68-72.  Did you know that data center managers could save 4 percent in energy costs for every degree of upward change in the set point? This is according to Mark Monroe of Sun Microsystems.

Data Room Airflow
The data center airflow had also better be kept in check.  Many IT centers have air conditioners for the data rooms but, what about the cabinet temperature of each rack?

A single humidity sensor can provide decent ambient temperature for the entire room.  The same is not true for temperature and especially not airflow. Placing a temperature and air flow sensor in each computer cabinet will help ensure proper data cabinet ventilation.

With proper airflow design, air moves evenly through the data center.  If you are using our data room security solution, you can consider adding a few cameras as well.

If you have questions or would like a demonstration, contact our data room and environmental monitoring  specialists.

Last week was the Summer Solstice which means the first day of summer. This is the official date of tourists, beaches, and hot weather. Temperature monitoring of a room doesn’t always give the best overall representation of the environmental conditions. With the temperature rising, you need airflow in your data centers to be at peak efficiency. Without good airflow your servers will gather dust and overheat.  An air flow sensor can save your data room from disaster. It can tell you if there is airflow through critical parts of the room that require cool air to function at optimal levels. So this coupled with Temperature, Humidity, and Water leak monitors you can create a power packed team of proactive environmental monitors. But you’re still not done yet!

If you have an industrial environment for your data center you are going to need some dry contact sensors. These will not only help with security detection but for your industrial air conditioning status as well. Dry contacts are a simple on/off switch that sends current to your sensor, which can easily detect if your air conditioning is simply running. This is a great way to be practically omnipotent in your data center.

I have only scratched the surface of what you can do to insure your data center from summer damage by proactively monitoring them. Stay tuned for Part 3 of this riveting series.

Although I think there are a few engineering flaws in the post, the design and concept are stable.

Using natural resources to cool your server room is clearly the next logical step in making server rooms green.

Now, I am not suggesting that you go and implement this type of hack in your company’s server room.  At the very least, this action would get you demoted and sent to the basement where you could display your very own red stapler.  At the worst, you could find your self celebrating the beginning of 2011 looking for new career opportunities.

What you should take from this in the near future is that the design and implementation of server rooms heating and cooling system will be using natural resources like the cold air from outside.  What will make this achievable and- more importantly- practical is the ability to monitor and react to environmental changes.  That is where the technology used in today’s temperature probes will shine.

So, until the future comes, I suggest using your very own Ravica environmental sensor probes to monitor the temperature and humidity in your server room, and to follow these five steps to protect hardware in your data center.

- Jimmy D

Why do I care about SNMP?
I care about SNMP because I want to manage everything from a central location. We use MyView in Scrutinizer. From a central location, we can monitor the network, the call center and, if we wanted to, the coffee pot.

BTW: Fugoo is considering a marketing plan for their network connected coffee maker, however, it lacks support for SNMP and the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

Come to find out, the best idea for coffee pot monitoring is a simple web camera.

SNMP Temperature Monitoring
We monitor temperature in our data rooms, call center, conference rooms and offices, and we do it all with our temperature sensors. We even put an airflow sensor in our HVAC air intake to monitor when the blower came on. I then polled for the SNMP information with Denika and produced historical trends with the data.

Summary
When we’re looking at hardware, equipment that supports SNMP generally makes it to our short list. All of our equipment supports SNMP.

- Mike

• Monitoring for water leaks
• Voltage monitoring for electrical brownouts or complete electrical loss
• Motion detection and automated photo delivery
• Airflow monitoring

The Ravica solutions include appliances which support all of the above intelligent sensors and include SNMP access to the data. A web interface to configure or review the data is also available.

And in case you are curious on where the expression “soup to nuts” originates from. I found this interesting.

- Mike

We also receive calls about security. This is something we can cover in a few different ways:

1. Using a contact security sensor on all doors or windows.
2. Motion detectors have been the topic of a few blogs.
3. We can install strobe lights that can indicate security breaches.
4. We can also install security cameras, which take pictures based on movement.

Pictures, like the ones above, can be emailed and/or archived, depending on the business needs. Sensitivity can also be adjusted.

Our equipment isn’t limited to specialized temperature and humidity monitoring. Please keep us in mind for security as well.

- Mike

The reason for our cubicles being so nice and warm was because the air conditioning (which is normally blasting non-stop) was not turning on. After several hours, the nice toasty office become a stagnant bog of stale air. Breathing nothing but other people’s CO2 was getting my coworkers and I very sluggish and lethargic – not to mention hot and sweaty.

Luckily, we had a couple of airflow sensors placed in front of the air conditioning vents. As I mentioned, the air conditioning in our work area is typically blowing all day, and quite hard, so to have it shut off for a while and let the office temperature rise a bit, is actually a good thing. However, we can now see that if it does not start back up in a reasonable time frame, things can go too far in the other direction.

To alleviate the issue of getting email alerts from the airflow sensor every time the air conditioning unit shut off, we tweaked the “Continuous time to report” field, under that sensor’s setup screen. Now we can occasionally get a reprieve from our normally frigid conditions, but if the air conditioner stays off for more than a couple of hours, the building manager and our office manager get an email alert. Of course, since we have the airflow sensor connected to a SecurityProbe, we can use escalated notifications. So if for any reason the building manager does not acknowledge the alert within an hour, then he gets a text message sent directly to his phone.

So it is certainly important to keep your expensive data room equipment from overheating, but it is just as important to keep your employees from overheating as well.

~ Jon Mills
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Solutions . . .

A great example is the solution that I found for a local amusement park. One of their outdoor venues was having an issue with their digital photography equipment overheating. It wasn’t economical to add air condition to the unit, so they needed to find a way to turn on multiple overhead fans automatically.

The management of this unit fell under the IT department, and the admin wanted to remotely monitor the data from his office (or any other portable device). The end solution was to monitor multiple environmental variables with the Ravica Sensor Probe and use the Sensor Controlled Relay to switch on the fan when the room temperature rises beyond the threshold level.

Since the sensor control unit has a user friendly web interface and an autosense feature, setting up the Sensor Controlled Relay is easy. The Sensor Controlled Relay can also be controlled via external computers, using the included SNMP command line utilities either interactively or programmatically.

From the unit itself, you can monitor the status of the Sensor Controlled Relay by four LEDs on the board. You can also monitor the unit remotely by using SNMP traps or the web interface, as well as e-mail and SMS alerts.

Implementation . . .

“The Sensor Controlled Relay provides 1 high-power SPDT 5V relay, with the maximum load up to 15A at 220 VAC. It includes Metal Oxide Varistors (MOVs) and Snubber circuits to protect the open contacts of the relays from high voltage spikes or noise transients. It monitors the power and load, and accepts a control signal, which is sent from the SensorProbe.”

We outsourced a local contractor to do the electrical work and the end result was better then we expected. Not only did we eliminate the equipment from overheating, but we are also able to trend the temp of the units over a given amount of time. This gave the admin a better picture of demand and heat generation.

Another thing to remember is the inlaid protection of this sensor. The Sensor Controlled Relay, it has a built in 16Amp circuit breaker and a 15Amp fuse (380 VAC, 125 VDC) giving it double protection for the external devices and possible damages by electrical fault. This assures protection for your sensor and your investment.

Conclusion . . .

As you can see, the Ravica Sensor Controlled Relay has many uses. It’s ability to control an array of analog devices makes it a versatile solution. It’s ability to monitor and protect itself make it a smart investment. That is why I recommend it every chance that I get.

- JimmyD

I think it would be cool if our solution could provide a diagram as shown below:

I found the above image from a company called inres.com. They make a product called TileFlow. TileFlow is a powerful three-dimensional software tool for simulating cooling performance of data centers. It uses the state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques, and is applicable to both raised-floor and non-raised-floor data centers.

If you don’t have unlimited resources, you could use our gear to create a map that looks like this:

The above is web based and the LEDs representing temperature, humidity and airflow change color based on thresholds. Notifications can be sent, and visual trends are provided, as well. It is a low cost solution, starting at $325.00 for temperature and humidity monitoring, and an airflow sensor can be added for another $125.00. That is tough to beat.

Contact us for a live demonstration of this capability.

- Mike