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.

Cold temperatures means freezing temperatures and with that usually comes snow which is needed for one of my favorite winter activities: snowmobiling!

I picked up my iPhone and checked out how the office was doing.

Isn’t technology today with smart phones amazing.  Above you can see our cameras, zoom in, check the humidity sensors, water detectors, outstanding alarms and more all with one thumb.

We of course setup the above system to give customer demonstrations.  Call us to check out our security monitoring solution.

Server Room Monitoring

If you have a need to monitor the environment of your server room, our server room environmental monitoring solution could be the solution you have been looking for. See the screen capture below.  We can also add web cameras.

Reach out to our team if you would like a demonstration
of our data room temperature, humidity, smoke, camera, motion, etc. monitoring solution.

I also learned that the LUX rating is extremely important when choosing a night vision camera.  The lower to zero the better. In other words, .001 is extremely good night vision. Configuration of the security dashboard is also important.  I was able to setup a security map which listed where I had placed our temperature monitors, humidity monitors, security cameras, water sensors, air flow sensors, smoke, dry contact and DC voltage sensors.  I got it all setup before I finished my morning coffee.

Believe it or not, dry contact sensors are popular especially in data room temperature monitoring.  The techs love the Security web interface.

If you want to learn more about the process I went through to set up our security monitoring system, give us a call.

• sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev
• sudo apt-get install softflowd

After softflowd is installed you can run it on an interface. In the example below eth0 is attached to a mirrored port (uplink) on a core switch and the NetFlow is being sent to 10.1.10.1 on UDP 2055. This will allow you to see all of the flows on the switch.

• sudo softflowd –v 9 –n10.1.10.1:2055 –i eth0 –m 100000 –t general=60s

Use a free NetFlow monitoring tool such as Scrutinizer.  Scrutinizer NetFlow Analyzer will treat this as a new exporter, but will only report using a single interface, 0. All of the flows are tagged with a source interface of 0 and a destination interface of 0.

What is the ambient temperature?  This is a tricky question that when answered correctly involves several answers!

Different things can impact the ideal ambient temperature.  Who or what is inside the room that could be impacting temperature (people, an oven, a light, etc.). The seals around windows, the temperature outside and other influencers such as air flow can all be a factor when trying to determining ambient temperature. If you are painting a car, the ideal temperature depends on the type of paint and on the material being painted.

The ideal temperature obviously depends on the individual or on the application involved. For most, 22 °C (71.6 °F) is the recommended living room temperature, and 18 °C (64.4 °F) is a good bedroom temperature.

Don’t forget about humidity detection.  Although moisture in the room can help make it feel warmer, it generally does not impact the ambient temperature. If it is, we have humidity sensors for humidity monitoring!

The Map Tab on the software will allow you to upload your own image file as the background. We took a screen capture of our office from Google maps and used it as our map image. First, click the button to the left that says ‘Add New Map‘. Next, choose your photo to upload and give it a name on the interface.

Next, you can select if you want to set it as a parent map or a primary map. After clicking next again, you will be taken to a screen where you will be walked through unlocking the map. After unlocking it you will be able to drag and drop your icons for each sensor to anywhere on the image.

Keep in mind these icons are configurable. Once you lock the map you can click each icon and select the ‘icon Settings‘ and change the icons for each sensor.

Now, you can go ahead and add the map option to the Summary Tab and see it displayed on the main page.

If you look at your layout settings you can select the ‘Map” option and click Save Layout. Now the map will be displayed on the main summary tab along with other video surveillance devices.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We got ours setup and attached a few cameras that we had laying around the office.  The web dashboard allowed me the select the most important cameras as well as view the log of environmental events that may end up triggering notifications.  All of this functionality in a single appliance.

One securityProbe can be used to connect several different cameras and at the same time provide ports for environmental sensors such as water leaks, temperature, humidity, smoke, power outages and more. This hardware provides one of the best low cost environmental, power and security monitoring solutions available on the net.

Notice below I filed on the domain ‘last.fm’.

Network traffic monitoring of audio streams is best done by looking at the traffic coming from different domains.

I filtered on the last.fm domain by running a host to host report.  It made me realize that it can be tough to monitor radio streaming by looking for a specific host because each time you listen to a new song, the stream comes from a new unique host.

If you don’t have NetFlow or IPFIX capable router or switch, consider contacting a nprobe reseller. The nProbe or nBox is generally placed off of a spanned or mirrored port of the switch.

Although the 2nd trend looks like the 1st, notice the colors don’t change in the 1st trend.  Make sure your NetFlow and IPFIX reporting tool has a domain report.

Nationally, the USA is not seeing a big increase in crime, however this is best measured locally according to the Bureau of Justice.  Is crime on the increase in your area?

What is interesting about this solution is that it doesn’t involve multiple monitor spread out over a wall with 1-2 people watching for problems (or sleeping).

Our solution is a dashboard that allows you to have cameras from different vendors in the same web interface.  You can place a gadget using any 3rd party URL into the mashup. I should be able to put some NetFlow probes  in here as well.

I can’t wait to start testing the playback features:

I should be able to post some details over the coming months.  I’ll even have some night vision cameras with inferred technology to tinker with.  I can’t wait!