Camera’s lend environmental reassurance
Filed under: Security Monitoring, airflow monitoring, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, motion detector, temperature monitoring
When it comes to monitoring the data center environmental conditions, we receive questions which pretty much cover the gamut. From staples, such as monitoring temperature or humidity, to measuring more difficult ambient conditions, such as airflow.
We also receive calls about security. This is something we can cover in a few different ways:
- Using a contact security sensor on all doors or windows.
- Motion detectors have been the topic of a few blogs.
- We can install strobe lights that can indicate security breaches.
- We can also install security cameras, which take pictures based on movement.
Airflow in data centers requires careful monitoring
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:
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:
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
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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