After the strike Amazon lost power and their backup generators did not kick on, it didn’t take long for the reserve battery to quickly deplete. You may not lose your power from something as monumental as a lightening strike, but being preventative is imperative. Losing data due to environmental catastrophes should not be “occasionally expected”. These things can be prevented.

Environmental sensors can be a huge investment for the future of your data center. With a water sensor you can detect any water leaks in the length of the rope. With a temperature and humidity sensor you can prevent both overheating of the servers and condensation. With an airflow sensor you can also prevent overheating of your hardware. The list goes on and on.

The most amazing thing about these sensors is that they are all network capable. You can connect all of these to sensor probes and start to track events through SNMP. With a centralized log management tool you can set notifications through email and SMS to stay on top of any disaster. Now you are ready to tackle the world of databases.

According to a study in 2007 by Professor Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University found that due to the virtualization of servers power consumption should still increase. In his report in 2010 all data center power was consuming 1.7 to 2.2 percent of total electricity used in America as opposed to 1.1 to 1.5 worldwide. These numbers were far less than his original predictions in 2007. With these numbers I can believe we are going in the right direction but how do we keep this up?

Monitoring your electricity consumption through a Power Monitor Sensor is a great way to stay on top of your carbon foot print. With the Power Monitor Sensor connected through a Security Probe you can be alerted of any spikes in power via MMS, SMS, SNMP traps and email.

It is also great to trend your power consumption to see how you can cut your power bill. You can do this with a performance trending software that has the ability to graph SNMP at your fingertips.

So there you have it. If we stay vigilant with our power consumption than we can save the world some major power and save you some coin in your pocket.

Voltage monitoring should be a concern. Why? Because your battery backup will only last so long and you need to know when / if they are being used. Below is a rough outline of a conversation I had recently with our network engineer during an ice storm:

Mike: Hello Tom, does the office have power?
Tom: I don’t know, let me check.
<60 seconds>
Tom: I can ping the server at the office so we must have power.
Mike: Ya but, is it on battery backup or does the office have power?
Tom: Ah, good question.

Thankfully, we had the voltage detector configured in our server room. Think of this sensor as sort of like those handy voltage sensors you keep in the house to see if you are getting power from an outlet.

Monitoring power consumption is a smart idea. If your data center goes down, even if it is only a couple of servers, a router and a switch, it could cost you serious money.

A good environmental monitoring solution should include power monitoring when it comes to the data center.

- Mike

The energy project is a collaboration between the Engineering and Information Technology programs of the college and funded by a local community grant. The goal of the project was to help middle school students build two unique energy sources using the power, and in the end, collect data for reporting. Each energy segment needs to be monitored separately. The first segment was going to be wind and the second would be solar.

The solar side would consist of  two collectors and one battery storage unit. Each one of these collectors would have a sensorprobe (the storage unit would have a sensor probe and a digital voltmeter). This would allow the team to record how much energy the cells produced, at any given time. We would also be able to tell the combined energy sent to the storage unit and, at the same time, tell how much energy is in the storage unit.

The wind side would have a similar setup. Each turbine would have a sensor. This would tell us how much energy the turbine was producing. Adding the digital voltmeter to the main feed of the storage unit would tell us combined energy production. The AC Voltage Detector would tell us the state of the wind turbines at any time. What makes the wind side of the project different is that the turbine can produce energy any time.

In both of these cases,  the students would have to construct the power units from general industry parts. They couldn’t buy an off the self solution. One of the reasons they decided to go with the Ravica line of sensorprobes for data collection was due to the fact that the probes were totally independent of the energy production system. Setting alarms gives you the added feature of being able to monitor the entire system. This is what they needed to meet the needs of the project, not to mention it helped them come in under budget.

On the data side of things, the team would compile the data from each sensor and reference hourly data from gathered the NOAA weather data. They would then take all of this data and feed it to a community web portal. In the end, they would be able to see how much energy each unit was able to produce at any time. They would all be able to see how weather played in each of the individual units production, and if the entire system compensates for any loss per unit.

I am going to keep this project on my radar. It’s exciting to see these kids having fun and exploring alternitive forms of energy.

- JimmyD

They don’t have the budget or can’t get the budget to update their aging equipment. So, what can these admins do to extend the life of their equipment?

Just like an older automobile, maintenance and proper care of the equipment can easily extend your equipment’s life. Constant monitoring of your system inside and out can save you from loosing mission critical servers. Environmental monitors like the temperature and humidity, airflow, smoke and water sensors can be used to make sure that the environment that your systems operate in are the best they can be.

Now, I know what you are saying, “Jim’s just a salesman and wants you to buy something.” Although I might get excited about a product and preach its goodness, I am not a sales person . I might dream of being the star of a Shamtastic infomercial, but trust me, I’m not. What I do want you to know, is that there are some simple things that you can to to help save your hardware.

• Your server room is not a storage area! If it is, it really shouldn’t be. Extra stuff in the room can cause heat issues and possibly be a fire hazard. Keep the area clean and free of obstacles.
• Manage your cables properly. I had a boss who had a hang up on making sure the all cables were organized correctly. You guessed it, I didn’t think it was all that important. In hindsight, I was wrong. Keeping them organized is great for physical management, but more importantly, it makes it easier to manage airflow. Be it a cable tunnel or just pulling them together with a zip tie, making sure your servers get the correct ventilation is important.
• Have a physical maintenance window for your machines. It might bring you back to youthful A+ days, but making sure the servers are dust free  and cables are in the correct place can help immensely.
• Monitor the servers health with an SNMP Trending app. Most servers can give you CPU, Server Temp, Fan Info and other valuable information, via a simple SNMP walk. A SNMP trending application, like Denika,  will allow you to gather historical information on this data and alert on it.
• Monitor your environment.  As I mentioned before, monitoring the room temp, humidity and airflow will make your admin life a lot easier.  If you have some room in your budget, this might be the best way to spend it.

So there it is.  I guess the old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” is correct. Even in today’s super digital world!

- Jimmy D

SNMP v3 added some much needed security features, like ensuring message integrity, verifying that the message came from a valid source with authentication, and packet encryption to ensure that messages aren’t being disseminated by unauthorized sources.

Because of its enhanced security features, SNMP v3 quickly found itself a requirement for many government and secure corporate projects. Since 2004, SNMP v3 has found itself a home in most networks with any sort of security requirements.

That is why the Ravica SecurityProbe line of SensorProbes supports SNMP v3. From within the Settings tab, simply select SNMP under the Connectivity header to the left. You will see the screen below.

From here you can select the type of security features required:

• No Authentication
• Authentication Only
• Authentication & Encryption

Enter your desired password, choose your authentication protocol and access privilege, then it’s off to the races. Now all of your SNMP information will be sent/polled from the SecurityProbe in version 3.

This is a highly popular feature amoung SecurityProbe users. Hopefully, if you didn’t already know it was there, you will find it valuable to impliment in your network. It is now as easy as ever to keep your physical data room details secure.

~ Jon Mills
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How are dry contact closures useful? Well, an example would be an electromagnetic relay that starts a motor. When the motor starts, the dry contact changes states, as the mechanical action of the starter moves it. Dry contact switches can be set off by any number of things. For instance, dry contact solutions are often used with burglar alarms, smoke alarms, UPS, AC units and many more.

So how does Ravica tie into this? The SecurityProbe-x20 and SecurityProbe-x60 are how. If you hadn’t guessed, the “x” stands for the number of dry contact connections that are built into the units. The securityProbe-X20/60 comes with 8 full auto-sense RJ-45 ports, for connecting any of our intelligent sensors. An additional 20 two-wire dry contact ports are provided, giving a total of up to 28 dry contact ports. The specially designed two-wire dry contact ports are easy to use, and allow you to make your own dry contact cables quickly and easily.

The SecurityProbe systems support both normally open (NO) and normally closed (NC) contacts. This is a setting specified within the web interface.

If you have an existing security system or HVAC system, chances are it will integrate with the SecurityProbe-x20/60. When the attached switch changes states, the SecurityProbe instantly knows and can be configured to perform any number of given actions; from sending an email alert or an SMS message, to delivering an automatic shutdown command to your servers before they drain the attached UPS.

If you are a user of the BitSight line of sensor probes and are not ready to upgrade to the x20 or x60 line, but have a need for monitoring dry contact ports, then a single dry contact sensor may be exactly what you need. The individual dry contact sensors, because they attach to the the intelligent sensor ports, are able to operate in both input and output mode.

Dry contact sensors are sometimes referred to as “dumb sensors,” simply because with dry contacts everything is a “yes” or a “no.” But the openness and simplicity of the dry contact system make them anything but dumb to use.

~ Jon Mills
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• “On Monday June 29, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) experienced a power outage at its Dallas data center that left several areas of the facility without power for about 45 minutes, knocking many popular customer web sites offline.
• “Early Thursday Equinix Inc. (EQIX) data centers in Sydney, Australia and Paris each experienced power failures. While the power outages were brief – Equinix said the Sydney event lasted 12 minutes while power was restored in Paris in just one minute – many key customer sites took considerably longer to recover their systems. The Sydney event led to disruptions for VoIP service in parts of Australia, while the Paris outage caused downtime for the popular video site DailyMotion and the French portal for hosting firm ClaraNet.
• “Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform, had lengthy performance problems on Thursday, experiencing high latency and data loss.
• “A fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle late Thursday night left many of the building’s data centers without power. The fire in an basement-level electrical room triggered sprinklers and caused extensive damage to generators and electrical equipment. The damage left tenants with backup plans offline for hours, and those without backup sites down until temporary generators restored power early Saturday morning. The biggest impact was at payment gateway Authorize.net, which was offline for more than 12 hours, leaving its merchant customers unable to process credit card sales. Other sites experiencing lengthy downtime included AdHost, GeoCaching and Microsoft’s Bing Travel.
• “Early Sunday, July 5, a fire at 151 Front Street, the major carrier hotel in Toronto, knocked out power on several floors of the facility used by Peer 1 networks. Power was restored in about 3 hours, after a damaged UPS unit was bypassed.”

The author, Rich Miller then goes on to point out some tough questions and the lessons learned from these outages.

Although it is surprising that data centers of this size can experience an outage like this, what is even more surprising is that it all happened in a week’s span. I wonder, is the National Security Agency going to look into this?

The equipment used to monitor this size data center is monumental, but even the smallest IT department can obtain economically priced sensor equipment, like the Bitsight8, combined with Intelligent Sensors, like the AC Voltage Detector and the Digital Voltometer.