Ravica Blog » flood monitoring

Environmental Monitoring Sensors: More Than Just Fancy Smoke Detectors

Angela — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:59:23 +0000

During a conversation this week, an associate of mine explained that his business is growing exponentially. His operation expanded from 5 locations to 18 locations in just 2 years. Considering the national economy during this last 2 years, I found this to be an astonishing and noble feat. But then he casually mentioned something else: one of his centers recently lost data due to a water leak. He mentioned it almost in passing, as if losses of this nature were to be occasionally expected.

Sadly, this type of water damage is fairly common. Not as common as the Old Spice Guy videos on YouTube, but common nonetheless.

This type of accident can severely cripple a business and shouldn’t be expected or taken lightly. My associate’s story serves as a glowing example of the importance of environmental sensors. A Ravica SensorProbe would have notified him immediately of the situation. He could have received notifications through email, Skype, Twitter, or texts on his cell phone, and the damage could have been dramatically reduced or potentially totally eliminated.

The SensorProbe is a versatile device to alert on the presence of water, temperature fluctuations, and smoke before the damage is crippling to a business. The sensors can be placed virtually anywhere and aren’t limited to just data centers or offices.

Environmental monitoring sensors are more than just fancy smoke detectors. Devices from Ravica can prevent the need to repair damaged facilties and recreate lost data, saving you tremendous amounts of money. They are versatile devices designed to keep you in control.

~Angela
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Avoiding water damage during floods

Jessica Raflo — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:51:42 +0000

This past weekend, the remnants of tropical storm Ida showed up in Southern Maine as a rain-soaked nor’easter. Fortunately, for us, we didn’t see the wide spread flooding and coastal erosion that other areas experienced further south on the New Jersey and Delaware coasts.

Seeing all the news footage of flooded streets made me think about how important it is to be prepared for water infiltration due to flooding. According to the Red Cross, floods are among the most frequent and costly natural disasters, causing more than 90% of the damage related to natural disasters. On average, floods cause more than $4 billion in damages worldwide, per year. Proper preparation is equally important for businesses and homeowners.

There are a lot of preventative measures that can be taken to avoid water damage, such as moving vital electronics to higher levels and raising mechanical equipment off the floor. But what if a flood occurs after hours or while a homeowner is away? How can you make sure that your equipment is as safe as possible? One way is to have a water detection sensor in place that is connected to your network and set up to alert you via SNMP or email, when a water leak is detected. With automatic notification, you can get to the problem fast or at least call someone to check on the situation.

Ravica provides water detection solutions that can be scaled equally well for a large data center or a single family home. If you’ve got a location where flood damage is a danger, we’d love to help you design a water leak monitoring system that can help protect your data and valuables.

~ Jessica

Water leak detection systems in the server room

Jon Mills — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:32:53 +0000

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.

Awareness
The second part to the equation is being aware of what is going on in your data center. We’ve already discussed the security side of data center awareness by monitoring your data center with cameras, security sensors for doors and windows, as well as motion detectors. However, as I mentioned, knowing of any present water leaks is equally important.

Placing a water leak sensor in trouble spots can be incredibly informative. Where are these trouble spots? Typically, network administrators want to watch for water leaks, first and foremost, directly beneath server racks. Obviously, we hope we are already aware of any present water before it gets anywhere near the server racks, but this gives us the last ditch baseline type of alert – the dam is breaking (no pun intended) and something needs to be fixed immediately. After we have our racks covered, we want to put water sensors near any nearby windows, doors, AC units or HVAC systems, as well as any open ventilation.

The Ravica line of SensorProbes offers key alerting features like email and text alerts, even alerting via Skype. Using the Sensor Controled Relay, a user could even turn on a sump pump system when a water sensor goes into alert.

So, while it is important to keep tabs on the temperature and humidity of your data room, it is also important to make sure you protect the expensive equipment that occupies that facility from water damage.

~ Jon Mills
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Ravica Sensor Probes help at the WaterPark

JimmyD — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:51:40 +0000

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