Environmental Monitoring During the Winter Months
Filed under: environmental monitoring, General, water leak monitoring
Today, we had our first major snow storm of the season. I’m a transplant to the northeast and winter in
Maine is still a jarring experience for me. My hometown of Vancouver, WA basically shuts down at the first sight of snow and doesn’t reopen until all the white stuff has melted away, which in a normal year is sometime before 4 pm on the same day. Around here, you just prepare, plow through and get on with business.
Winter requires some special preparation for the inside of your facility as well. With snow and ice comes the threat of water pipes bursting and power outages. Make sure that your facility is protected by having a back-up generator in place. You should also be sure that the main water pipes and any pipes that are running along uninsulated walls have been winterized. Read more
~JessicaFollow Me on Twitter
Mount Wilson Observatory In Danger From L.A. Fire
I just read this post on Slashdot:
“Mount Wilson is in danger from the Station fire burning near L.A. Their servers have gone offline, but there’s a temporary mirror cam. It doesn’t look good. Picture twenty-four on the L.A. Times photo gallery shows the observatory from the air. If anyone has any inside news on the condition of the facility, I’m sure there are lots of people on Slashdot that would love to hear it.”
It got me wondering about what type of SensorProbes they have. Most companies will never see this size of fire, but even a tiny fire can put a server room out of commission. That is why it is so important to use sensor probe technology to monitor our environment and alert us when something is wrong.
Anyway, I don’t want to use this as a sales pitch. So, let’s use the fire in California to remind us to check our home and office fire detection systems.
My prayers go out to all of the fire fighters, the people who have lost their homes and the people who’s homes are in danger.
- JimmyD
All my peeps have a smartphone!
Today is a hot day here in Maine. When it gets hot, in the 90′s, things slow down quickly. You have to remember that our bodies, our minds and our buildings are programed with the goal of staying warm. Staying cool just 
isn’t a necessity, since we have four warm days out of the year.
Like I said, today is hot. So to help deal with the heat, I decided to write about a light subject, something easy to swallow. Today’s blog is about my peeps and their SmartPhones.
Jon has an iPhone. I nag Jon everyday for being an Apple lemming. My issue with Apple goes back a long time and is purely personal. I was a eight years old and I really wanted a Macintosh. My parents couldn’t afford a Mac, it was only for the better off people. This divide made me bitter.
As far as a phone goes, it is one of the best. The double touch screen is slick, over all he doesn’t seem to have any complaints. The software selection is good but regulated. If Apple doesn’t want you to build a program for their phone, then you can’t sell it. Again, I’m kinda bitter about this.
I have the AT&T Tilt. This is a Windows Mobile phone that has its good and bad points. The best thing about my phone is that it is NOT an iPhone.
Since the Windows Mobile environment stretches across multiple platforms and has been around for quite a while, the software selection is abundant. In general it is an open environment and has a vibrant community.
The screen isn’t as responsive as I would like and sometimes you can really mess up your phone if you install the wrong piece of untested software. Can you say “Bricked!”?
Dale just got a Google phone. Dale was one of those people who always said, “I don’t need a phone like yours. I only make calls.” It has been a few days, and he has clearly changed his song. He is now a disciple of the goodness that is SmartPhone technology. Dale is installing apps, using GPS, texting and making calls. He is a happy camper.
So why am I telling you about my peeps and their different phones? Simply put, we have three different camps of people, with three different ways of thinking.
You have your iPhone people, who want their provider to make sure every app works on your phone, protects you from any bad application and distributes their apps via one common provider. You get a good, safe and friendly phone.
You have the Windows Mobile camp, who believe that any app, no matter how bad or untested it is, should be available. They want choice, multiple phones, multiple options and freedom. The Windows Mobile world has its ups and downs. If you are not careful, you can get more then you bargained for.
The GPhone has a large community. Their software is built on an open source environment. They are safe, regulated by the users, tested by the users and over all crunchy.
Even though all of these phones are different, they still can easily communicate with each other. Maybe our politicians should learn a lesson from the ups and downs of the SmartPhone market? Maybe they could learn to communicate with each other in one common protocol and have the luxury of error checking?
What a wonderful world we live in? I wonder what technology my daughter will use when she is my age?
- JimmyD
Should we Recycle Server Room Heat?
Over the weekend, I was watching System, which is one of my favorite shows on Revision3 .com. One of the questions was on how to use the excess heat generated by computers to heat a room. I am a big supporter of the “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” philosophy, and thought that was a great idea.
After some hard and heavy Google’n, I was excited to find out other ways people have used this wasted server room energy. The story of a Mid-Western college saving their greenhouse caught my eye.
“The University of Notre Dame’s high-performance computing (HPC) department has taken things a step further. It now reuses the heat generated by its servers to warm up a historic greenhouse that the city of South Bend, Ind., has threatened to shut down.”
By using the heat from the server they are saving the university $100,000 on cooling costs and the owner of the botanical garden, the City of South Bend, Indiana, another $70,000 on heating costs. It’s win-win for everyone.
Now I am trying to figure out ways to implement this type of thinking here at work and at home. I think that my first step would be to add another temperature probe to the back of the server rack. This should give me the data that I need.
Maybe I can use the excess heat to warm up my cube. I’ll update you with what I find out.
Office Humidity Monitoring
Filed under: environmental monitoring, General, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes
Until a few years ago I didn’t worry much about the humidity level in the office. One day I was commenting to one of my coworkers about how my body is prone to more static electricity shocks in the winter. He brought up the topic of humidity.
I decided to look into what the proper humidity level should be in our office. I found out that when relative humidity is kept at about 50%, employees have fewer respiratory problems, as well. Humidity at too high a level makes the office feel “stuffy,” not to mention the problems it can cause with bacterial or fungal growth.
Humidity lower than 50% can cause discomfort by drying out the mucous membranes, contributing to skin rashes. Dry conditions cause electrostatic charge on both office equipment and their users. Ouch! Wouldn’t want expensive electronic equipment to start having problems.
Here is the humidity level in the office of one of our customers:
Does it look healthy to you? He decided to put the humidity probe on the internet so that the land lord could see it from the internet. If it isn’t fixed, he could setup the probe to email him every time a threshold is breached. HA!
Help Desk: Got password?
Filed under: environmental monitoring, General, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes
One of the most common support issues, if not the most common support issue, encountered with Ravica equipment is also one of the simplest. Whether you have turned on the Administrator password option without specifying a password, or if you have recently found yourself in charge of maintaining the environmental monitoring equipment, or if you just plain forgot it; it can be frustrating to get locked out of your SensorProbe.
The main thing to remember is, “remain calm.” We are here to help. The first thing to try is to log in using the default password of “public“. Of course, make sure to leave out the quotation marks.
If you are not able to log in with the default password, then someone has set a password, and it very well may be lost forever. Again, “remain calm.” We can still help. Just go to the Ravica Customer Support page and complete the form with your information. Make sure to specify your product model. In the description box, make sure to note the MAC Address (found on the bottom of the SensorProbe) of the unit in question.
Now, give a support repesentative some time to respond (usually within 24 hours), and they will get back to you with a Master Password.
From there you can log into the device with that password. However, it is a good idea to reset your Administrator password and use that. As always, make sure to keep sensative information in a safe place and don’t use passwords that are too obvious.
If you have any other support related inquiries, or if you are looking for more informaton about password management, feel free to contact us via email or call us at 207-324-8173.
~ Jon Mills
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Using SensorProbes to prove the office temperature is too low.
Filed under: environmental monitoring, General, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes
I was angry. Well, maybe just a little mad, but no matter what, I was still upset. The office was unbelievably cold, and it had been going on for way too long. By cold, I mean goose bumps and jackets every afternoon. When I would go for a lunch time walk (as I often do), my muscles would cramp, due to the drastic temperature change. As I said, it was cold.
Needless to say, something had to be done. I complained to the powers that be, but their first response was less then rewarding. Answers like “It’s in your head,” or “You are right under the vent,” were explored; but I knew that they were wrong.
Luckily, things got worse. The temperature was getting colder and for longer periods of time. More people were saying things like “Gee it’s cold,” or “Hey, are you cold?” and “Turn up the heat or I am breaking up the conference room table and building the biggest bonfire this side of Boston.” In one remote section of the office there were a group of dissidents that wanted to change the company dress code so that it included a L.L Bean Arctic Parka.
At this point I decided to throw on my Jimmy D detective hat and get some proof. Since I am Uber Geek, I decided to use the tools of my trade, I would need technology!
I integrated a high scale, super conductive data collection station into my work environment. To be honest with you, it surpasses the one that I once viewed at MIT that is currently used to monitor global warming. In reality, I secretly moved my BitSight2 temperature probe from the server room over to my desk. I then setup Denika to trend its SNMP data. With Denika I was able to set a minimum temperature threshold, which would alert me when the temp fell.
I diligently collected data for two weeks. I even adjusted the threshold, as I saw the temp get lower and lower. The data was conclusive. I had my answer. I could now confidently register my complaint to the powers that be and demand change! At the same time, I now had the ability to defuse the previously described uprising. Viva Data! Viva Jimmy D! Maybe I need to get out of my cube more often?
Again, in reality, I took this data to my boss and quickly showed him that in the afternoons were seeing an average of 54 degrees, mornings were a bit higher. He took this to building management and they are currently in the process of finding out what the issue is.
The good news is that my cube is getting warmer, the bad news is the I got my BitSight taken away!
Simple Ways To Make Your Server Room Green
Did you know that there are simple ways to make your current server room green?
“There are hundreds of areas identified as server rooms or data centers – from small server closets to large enterprise data centers, each with unique needs. Despite differing specifications, one key important conservation practice is to keep servers out of undesignated spaces; they should be housed in a server closet, server room, or data center that adheres to the energy-saving best practices.” – UMICH.edu
The University of Michigan has pointed out simple ways to adjust how your current setup can be adjusted to help you save energy and your environment. They list options for data centers the size of a closet (1 to 2 servers) to Enterprise size (100′s of servers)
Corria Nucci from Informationweek’s Green Computing Webblog points out that one of the best ways to save energy is to consolidate your servers. This option has become popular in recent years due to the power of the recent processors and the ease of “Virtual” environments like VMWare.
Analysts, however, are skeptical about all the new marketing over greener IT. “Many of the answers are things that don’t generate publicity, such as rightsizing the facility and supporting green design principles,” says Steve Wallage, a managing consultant at BroadGroup.
The end result is that companies are not buying into the hype due to cost or lack of supporting data. They just can’t see it helping.
The best answer? IT analysts and vendors both agree it is in metrics: studying power consumption, reallocating server loads, refocusing airflows—and even in simple measures such as shutting off a server that’s not in use.
This can all be done with simple equipment that will help you monitor your server rooms environmental conditions, such as Ravica’s “Used Power Monitor Sensor” and the “Temperature” and “Air Flow” sensors. In the end, these small steps will not only help the world be a little greener and possibly cut down your energy and equipment costs.
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Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!
Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/jimmydnet
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Why is that iPhone on my network?
Using Ravica environmental monitoring products can help protect your network from the physical world but what about the new mobile world? Can your protect your network from the Smartphone cloud? Smartphones are all around us. The advent of the iPhone had brought their use to the forefront of the IT department. As a result there use has burdened the corporate network and become a big security risk. You can’t ignore the growth, recent surveys show that smartphone use is rising and should grow by 25% in the next three years.
So what do you do?
The influx of smartphones also creates a host of challenges for any IT pro seeking to manage that rapidly growing portion of the enterprise. Armed with the right information and tools, you can make sure that the true potential of a highly mobile workforce is realized.
Dawn the correct armor.
A smartphone can operate inside and outside of your firewall, similar to a laptop. Since you are using smaller operating system, and in some cases unique, your job becomes a little more difficult. So that means making sure your smartphone connections are secure is priority number one. I found a great article that explains how to secure your smartphones and the data that they access. Here is a similar white paper from ZDNET.
Manage your army:
So how do we manage smartphones when they are on and off of your network? Matt Bancroft from Smartphone Security Magazine tells us that, “like the laptops of remote workers, smartphones need to be catered to as a part of the network and subject to corporate management and security measures. It is essential that companies have a corporate IT management policy in place that takes these smart mobile devices into account.”
Three things IT departments must consider when smartphones are running enterprise applications are:
- Operational Continuity: Once employees are trained and start to rely on the applications on their phones, you need to make sure that they are running all the time. This means controlling the phone’s firmware and the other applications that run on it to ensure that it has 100% up time.
- Reducing Support Costs: You need to be able to take control of phones remotely or push files when needed. This can be extremely helpful.
- Security and Compliance: This includes backups to ensure data can’t be lost, and encryption or remote device wiping to protect data when a device is stolen or misplaced. It may also include communications controls, such as archiving SMS messages or preventing them altogether.
Management tools include Sybase with iAnywhere (for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm OS and Symbian), Logmein (for Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry shortly), and Microsoft with its Mobile Device Manager 2008 module, which is part of its System Center family of management products for devices running Windows Mobile 6.1.
Here are some items that you want to look for in your management application.
- Active Directory/Group Policy domain join
- Mobile VPN with dual-factor authenticated access
- Application allow and deny
- SMS, Bluetooth and camera disablement with Active Directory Group Policy-based targeting
- Over the air device provisioning and software deployment
- Device inventory and reporting
- Help desk console and role-based administration
- Device wipe
It’s clear that smartphones are becoming a more integral part of most enterprises. Today’s technology workers are more tech-savvy than ever The influx of smartphones also creates a host of challenges for any IT pro seeking to manage that rapidly growing portion of the enterprise. But armed with the right information and tools, you can make sure that the true potential of a highly mobile workforce is realized.
____________________________________
Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!
Follow me on Twitter
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5 tips for an energy-efficient data center
Designing a data center is much like designing a nursery for a newborn baby. You want your pride and joy to be happy and thrive in a room that’s not too cold, not too warm, and have the correct humidity. Below are five top tips to a happy data center. The tips are taken from the Green Grid‘s recently released whitepaper Fundamentals of data center power and cooling efficiency zones.
1. Blowing hot and cold: Having parallel rows of equipment racks facing forward may look neat and tidy but it could make a sauna out of your data center. IT equipment sucks in cool air via the front and pushes out hot air from the back. If a machine is spewing out hot air the device behind it is sucking that in when it should be taking in cold air. Imagine how hot the air must be in the last row of machines. The ideal placement for rows of equipment would be to have the front of the servers facing each other. The backs of the rows should also be facing each other to create a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration.
2. Place cables overhead: If the space underneath the raised floor is a spaghetti junction of cables cool air won’t be able to do its job in the data center. Cables should be distributed overhead and unused raised floor cutouts should be blocked to eliminate unwanted air leakage. The Green Grid recommends that perforated tiles, with a design of about 25% open area, should be used to ensure uniform and predictable airflow distribution in lower density areas.
3. Recommended temperatures: The recommended range of temperature for critical enterprise server and storage environments is between 64.4° to 80.6° F (18° to 27° C), according to the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), as cited in the whitepaper. ASHRAE also specifies a dew point value of about 5.5° C (41.9° F).
4. Set air conditioners to the same levels: Computer room air conditioning units with humidifiers are a great addition to ensure optimum humidity of the data center but if you have more than one, be sure that they are set to the same settings. If not, they could be operating at odds with one dehumidifying the air while the other is humidifying it.
5. Cool the source. The white paper recommends using row and rack-based cooling to address dynamic hot spots that can form as workloads are constantly shifted from one server to another. Cool air has a much shorter path of distribution, so bringing cooling closer to the heat source is key.