Are you optimizing your environmental monitoring system?
Filed under: Intelligent Sensors, environmental monitoring
Here on the Ravica Blog, we talk a lot about temperature and humidity monitoring in data centers, but did you know 
that you can use the same Sensor Probes to create a centralized monitoring system that can provide information on almost any environmental condition? The following is a run-down of some of the other Ravica intelligent sensors that are available. All the sensors are plug & play, SNMP-enabled and easily integrated into the environmental monitoring system of your dreams. Read more
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Ravica Sensor Probes help at the WaterPark
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about how I helped a local amusement park solve an overheating problem with Ravica’s sensor probes. Luckily, I schedule follow up calls to make sure that everything is working as planned. I found out that they have another issue that I can help with.
This amusement park has an attached water park with 20 plus rides. The water for all of these rides is supplied from three pumping stations. Each pumping station has a small data center. The pump section of each of these units has all the emergency equipment that you could ask for, but the data center lacked.
A few weeks ago, they had one of their sump pumps fail. The water backed up quite a bit and flooded the floor of the data closet. The good news is that they only had to replace a few of the items that were near the floor, but it was clear that they needed a solution.
I suggested that they get the BitSight2 and use the water sensors along with the AC voltage detector. The water sensor would detect if any water is getting near the door. It would then alert if the water starts to build up near the door. We then would use the AC Voltage Detector to monitor the power coming from the sump pump. Now we can detect if the pump kicks in and turns off. If water is getting to a certain point and the pump is not on, you need to check the situation.
The BitSight2 can store all this information for historical reporting. Now they can generate reports on how many times the sump pumps had to kick in and how many times the water level reached the marked point.
The customer placed the order today and we are going to implement the solution next month. I can’t wait to see it in action.
- JimmyD
School uses Ravica sensorprobes to measure green energy
Filed under: SensorProbes, environmental monitoring, power monitoring
We just received a call from a community college in the Mid West. They wanted to purchase four AC Voltage Detectors to integrate into their solar and wind power project. Since I am big on alternative energy and the application of technology to measure it, I jumped on this call right away.
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
5 tips to protect your data center hardware
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, power monitoring, temperature monitoring, water leak monitoring
I work with network administrators everyday and I hear one common story. They are not buying servers. The IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker supports me on this. Server vendors are reporting that their business is off 24.5 percent from last year, falling to $9.9 billion in the first quarter of 2009.
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
Five major data center outages reported last week
Filed under: Data Center, SensorProbes, power monitoring, smoke detector
The website Data Center Knowledge recently published an alarming report about five major data center outages that occurred in the past week. Here is a brief breakdown from the article.
- “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.
Solar power and your network
Filed under: Data Center, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes, environmental monitoring
I just finished an article written by Robin Lloyd, titled “Solar Power to Rule in 20 years.” Alternative energy sources have always been my passion, so I read on; maybe it would shed some light on the subject (lol – had to say it). Robin quotes Ray Kurzweil saying, “There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs.” Can you imagine being able to generate all the electricity required to run your server room? Imagine being the person who brings this technology to your company?
I spent my lunch time researching my proof of concept design. I Googled Solar Panels and found everything from cool DIY YouTube videos to full service companies. Finding a package wouldn’t be that difficult. Monitoring the package and integrating its data into our current network would be a little more involved.
Monitoring the output of a solar panel can be done with the Ravica Power Monitor. The power monitor can read both 120v and 22v. With this monitor you are able to determine up/down state and measure voltage on a constant basis. With this data you can be alerted on the sensor exceeding a pre-defined threshold with industry leading notification options like: SNMP traps, email, SMS, MMS and the recently released Skype support. You can also use the data to trend the panels output.
I was done, a quick proof of concept that could work. Imagine being able to show your company how much the IT department is saving! It might be a dream now, but someday it will be reality. Bigger ideas have been planned on the back of a cocktail napkin. Mine was in a Google note book, so I am a step a head!
Did you notice that the price of oil is up again?
- Jimmy D
My Ravica sensorProbe woke me up! Time for some coffee.
What a morning here at our Network operations center. My cell phone paged me at 2:00 am letting me know that server room 4 was overheating. After I grumbled a few choice words, I got out of bed to see what the issue might be. I also received another page from the air flow probe .
I logged into Denika and then clicked on the SvrRoom4 report group. I pat myself on the back for being super smart. When we set up this server room I made sure to setup reports for the various Ravica probes and complimented them with other related SNMP reports. I have quite a few, port utilization, memory, CPU utilization and most importantly System Temperature.
So I looked at the reports. I drilled down in the historical graph and could see that the air flow sensor saw a steady decline a little after 1:30 am. I then went over to the temp sensor and started to see the temp climb around 1:45 am. The temperature sensor reached the threshold at 1:55 am.
At this point I was a bit puzzled. We had placed the air flow sensor by the cooling unit but the AC voltage detector was reporting fine. That means the environmental fan was running.
I’m lucky, I was the designer of this server room and was adamant about having a security light that I could turn off or on remotely. So I sent the command to turn on the light and then logged into the webcam. The good news is that I could see what happened. We had stacked some cardboard boxes on that wall and one had fallen in front of the vent. That means that fan was running but air couldn’t get out.
The good news is that I was able to find and remedy the problem quickly. The bad news is that I had to get dressed and drive over to the office and move the boxes. I did make sure to stack all the boxes on top of the desk of the person who was supposed to get rid of them in the first place!
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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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