Avoid Damage Caused by Data Center Humidity
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring
Agricultural experts in my hometown regularly uttered the phrase, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” In the data center environment, humidity can be an overlooked hazard. Both heat and humidity are threats that require attention in data centers.
Understanding how humidity in data centers affects electronics is an obvious requirement for Data Center Managers because it has a direct effect on a company’s bottom line. Ensuring that your business has ideal data center humidity levels impacts the lifespan of equipment and can decrease utility costs. Read more
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
Humidity Monitoring – Unforseen danger in your server room
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes
I was working with a client who had to replace multiple mother boards in their server room. I was surprised that he had to replace so many, so I gently asked, “What happened?”
He said he knew I would ask him that question. Over the weekend, the air conditioning unit for their server failed. It didn’t stop, it just stopped pushing out cold air. The room didn’t get too hot (thank goodness), but it produced a lot of moisture.
Apparently, it produced too much moisture, which caused condensation on the server rack that was closest to the air conditioning unit. The end result was multiple mother boards failing.
We spent the next few minutes going over the cost of the replacement boards and drives. I then let him know that we had a humidity probe that would alert him when humidity reaches a certain level. I suggested that he add it to his order and not take the risk of loosing another segment of his server room. He thought that it was a good idea and bought two!
“Relative humidity should be maintained at a level between 30%-50%. Failure to adhere to these particular specifications could result in serious corrosion of the copper wires that are contained within the UTP and STP. Such corrosion would deter efficient functioning of the network.” – Excerpt from Cisco Networking Academy book material. So I guess the old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” holds true. Take the time to monitor for humidity. It could help save your equipment.
- Jimmy D
Office Humidity Monitoring
Filed under: environmental monitoring, General, Intelligent Sensors, SensorProbes
Until a few years ago I didn’t worry much about the humidity level in the office. One day I was commenting to one of my coworkers about how my body is prone to more static electricity shocks in the winter. He brought up the topic of humidity.
I decided to look into what the proper humidity level should be in our office. I found out that when relative humidity is kept at about 50%, employees have fewer respiratory problems, as well. Humidity at too high a level makes the office feel “stuffy,” not to mention the problems it can cause with bacterial or fungal growth.
Humidity lower than 50% can cause discomfort by drying out the mucous membranes, contributing to skin rashes. Dry conditions cause electrostatic charge on both office equipment and their users. Ouch! Wouldn’t want expensive electronic equipment to start having problems.
Here is the humidity level in the office of one of our customers:
Does it look healthy to you? He decided to put the humidity probe on the internet so that the land lord could see it from the internet. If it isn’t fixed, he could setup the probe to email him every time a threshold is breached. HA!
Simple Ways To Make Your Server Room Green
Did you know that there are simple ways to make your current server room green?
“There are hundreds of areas identified as server rooms or data centers – from small server closets to large enterprise data centers, each with unique needs. Despite differing specifications, one key important conservation practice is to keep servers out of undesignated spaces; they should be housed in a server closet, server room, or data center that adheres to the energy-saving best practices.” – UMICH.edu
The University of Michigan has pointed out simple ways to adjust how your current setup can be adjusted to help you save energy and your environment. They list options for data centers the size of a closet (1 to 2 servers) to Enterprise size (100′s of servers)
Corria Nucci from Informationweek’s Green Computing Webblog points out that one of the best ways to save energy is to consolidate your servers. This option has become popular in recent years due to the power of the recent processors and the ease of “Virtual” environments like VMWare.
Analysts, however, are skeptical about all the new marketing over greener IT. “Many of the answers are things that don’t generate publicity, such as rightsizing the facility and supporting green design principles,” says Steve Wallage, a managing consultant at BroadGroup.
The end result is that companies are not buying into the hype due to cost or lack of supporting data. They just can’t see it helping.
The best answer? IT analysts and vendors both agree it is in metrics: studying power consumption, reallocating server loads, refocusing airflows—and even in simple measures such as shutting off a server that’s not in use.
This can all be done with simple equipment that will help you monitor your server rooms environmental conditions, such as Ravica’s “Used Power Monitor Sensor” and the “Temperature” and “Air Flow” sensors. In the end, these small steps will not only help the world be a little greener and possibly cut down your energy and equipment costs.
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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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