Ravica Blog » airflow sensors http://www.ravica.com/blog Environmental monitoring solutions that just work Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:32:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Airflow in data centers requires careful monitoring http://www.ravica.com/blog/environmental-monitoring/airflow-in-data-centers-requires-careful-monitoring/ http://www.ravica.com/blog/environmental-monitoring/airflow-in-data-centers-requires-careful-monitoring/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:29:57 +0000 Mike Allen http://www.ravica.com/blog/?p=357 Monitoring the temperature of a room from a single location sometimes does not provide a good overall representation of the ambient environmental conditions. I asked around and found out about Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). CFD can provide 3-D analysis of how air is moving through a data center and identify potential warm areas where equipment is likely suffering from too little airflow.

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

computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

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:

Airflow Room

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

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