Preventing Disasters With Environmental Probes
Filed under: environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, power monitoring, temperature monitoring, water leak monitoring
Environmental sensors prevent disasters. Have you ever been in a situation where you lose a server or all of your data center to something as silly as a water leak or a… lightening strike? Amazon has, sort of. On August 7th, Amazon experienced a temporary data center outage in their Dublin data center. They claimed that it was due to a lightening strike, but later admitted it was due to multiple internal technical faults, resulting from the lightening strike. Read more
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Data Center Power Consumption Grows Less
Filed under: Data Center, Notifications, power monitoring, SecurityProbes
Yesterday I stumbled upon an article that lifted my green-thumb environmental-loving spirit. It stated that the amount of power consumed by data centers around the world continues to grow…but not as much? I was intrigued so I continued reading.
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? Read more
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Summertime Data Room Monitoring: Part 2
Filed under: airflow monitoring, Data Center, environmental monitoring
In part one I went over the advantages of Temperature, Humidity, and Water leak monitoring. In this continuation of the saga will continue to focus on more ways to prevent the summer weather from damaging your data center while staying proactive in your defense. Read more
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Data center monitoring gets simpler with the new PoE BitSight2
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, Ravica News
It has been a long time coming, but due to customer demand, Ravica is pleased to announce the availability of the PoE (IEEE 802.3af Power over Ethernet) BitSight2 sensorprobe. Now all of your environmental monitoring needs can be met without even needing a separate power source.
That’s not to say you can’t still use the existing method of powering the device as the BS2 will retain the internal 7.5 VDC power supply and is a “Powered Device” so the power to the unit can be supplied from either the PoE or from the 7.5 VDC power adapter, acting as backup power in case of a PoE power supply failure.
Water leak detection systems in the server room
Filed under: environmental monitoring, water leak monitoring
With the importance placed on temperature and humidity monitoring and detecting hotspots in the data center, it is easy to forget that the second most common cause of catastrophic failure are water leaks. Whether your server room is located near refrigeration equipment used for building cooling, building facilities like bathrooms and kitchens or air conditioning units, precautions need to be taken.
Prevention
It all starts at the building planning level. Having an initial survey, to know if your building is in or near a flood zone, sounds like a no brainer, but it’s surprising how many people I speak with on a weekly basis that are in the heart of a flood zone with no water monitoring system in place. Once you know the situation your server room is in, it is important to take the necessary precautions by having the proper drainage installed, including a sump pump. This protects you in the event flooding becomes present.