Mount Wilson Observatory In Danger From L.A. Fire
I just read this post on Slashdot:
“Mount Wilson is in danger from the Station fire burning near L.A. Their servers have gone offline, but there’s a temporary mirror cam. It doesn’t look good. Picture twenty-four on the L.A. Times photo gallery shows the observatory from the air. If anyone has any inside news on the condition of the facility, I’m sure there are lots of people on Slashdot that would love to hear it.”
It got me wondering about what type of SensorProbes they have. Most companies will never see this size of fire, but even a tiny fire can put a server room out of commission. That is why it is so important to use sensor probe technology to monitor our environment and alert us when something is wrong.
Anyway, I don’t want to use this as a sales pitch. So, let’s use the fire in California to remind us to check our home and office fire detection systems.
My prayers go out to all of the fire fighters, the people who have lost their homes and the people who’s homes are in danger.
- JimmyD
All my peeps have a smartphone!
Today is a hot day here in Maine. When it gets hot, in the 90’s, things slow down quickly. You have to remember that our bodies, our minds and our buildings are programed with the goal of staying warm. Staying cool just 
isn’t a necessity, since we have four warm days out of the year.
Like I said, today is hot. So to help deal with the heat, I decided to write about a light subject, something easy to swallow. Today’s blog is about my peeps and their SmartPhones.
Jon has an iPhone. I nag Jon everyday for being an Apple lemming. My issue with Apple goes back a long time and is purely personal. I was a eight years old and I really wanted a Macintosh. My parents couldn’t afford a Mac, it was only for the better off people. This divide made me bitter.
As far as a phone goes, it is one of the best. The double touch screen is slick, over all he doesn’t seem to have any complaints. The software selection is good but regulated. If Apple doesn’t want you to build a program for their phone, then you can’t sell it. Again, I’m kinda bitter about this.
I have the AT&T Tilt. This is a Windows Mobile phone that has its good and bad points. The best thing about my phone is that it is NOT an iPhone.
Since the Windows Mobile environment stretches across multiple platforms and has been around for quite a while, the software selection is abundant. In general it is an open environment and has a vibrant community.
The screen isn’t as responsive as I would like and sometimes you can really mess up your phone if you install the wrong piece of untested software. Can you say “Bricked!”?
Dale just got a Google phone. Dale was one of those people who always said, “I don’t need a phone like yours. I only make calls.” It has been a few days, and he has clearly changed his song. He is now a disciple of the goodness that is SmartPhone technology. Dale is installing apps, using GPS, texting and making calls. He is a happy camper.
So why am I telling you about my peeps and their different phones? Simply put, we have three different camps of people, with three different ways of thinking.
You have your iPhone people, who want their provider to make sure every app works on your phone, protects you from any bad application and distributes their apps via one common provider. You get a good, safe and friendly phone.
You have the Windows Mobile camp, who believe that any app, no matter how bad or untested it is, should be available. They want choice, multiple phones, multiple options and freedom. The Windows Mobile world has its ups and downs. If you are not careful, you can get more then you bargained for.
The GPhone has a large community. Their software is built on an open source environment. They are safe, regulated by the users, tested by the users and over all crunchy.
Even though all of these phones are different, they still can easily communicate with each other. Maybe our politicians should learn a lesson from the ups and downs of the SmartPhone market? Maybe they could learn to communicate with each other in one common protocol and have the luxury of error checking?
What a wonderful world we live in? I wonder what technology my daughter will use when she is my age?
- JimmyD
The not so funny side of Network Management
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, temperature monitoring
Something odd happened today.
I was in a planning meeting with my manage
r and my AT&T Tilt started to vibrate. I find this very annoying. Of all things to happen during this super exciting meeting, this had to take the cake. Yes, I am being sarcastic and a bit over dramatic. The issue is still the same, I hate being annoyed.
The real point to this rant is to point out the subject of the alert. It was a SMS page from my Ravica tempature probe. It had been violated.
This issue raised multiple questions. The first, and most important, would be how to politely excuse myself from the meeting. In general, this wouldn’t be a hard thing to do, but my manager was excited about the new data room expansion project. By excited, I mean elated, and by elated, I mean that he expected everyone to have the same level of passion or face the most harsh punishment executed on mere mortals.
Knowing that I could lose my admin privileges, I forged on. I told Jon that something is happening in the sever room and had to leave. He said “ok” and went on with his conversation.
Puzzled, I quickly went into the server room and found the issue. Brandon, our new, green intern had placed his super hot cup of coffee next to the temp sensor. He was in the process of cleaning up cables and listening to the Ramones on his headset.
The heat from his coffee cup quickly raised the temp around the sensor.
From this I have learned two things. The first is that you should never leave your interns unattended. They can cause way too much damage. The second is to not locate your temperature sensor where someone can obstruct it in any way.
Now I have to explain this to my boss. Wish me luck.
- JimmyD
5 tips to protect your data center hardware
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, power monitoring, temperature monitoring, water leak monitoring
I work with network administrators everyday and I hear one common story. They are not buying servers. The IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker supports me on this. Server vendors are reporting that their business is off 24.5 percent from last year, falling to $9.9 billion in the first quarter of 2009.
They don’t have the budget or can’t get the budget to update their aging equipment. So, what can these admins do to extend the life of their equipment?
Just like an older automobile, maintenance and proper care of the equipment can easily extend your equipment’s life. Constant monitoring of your system inside and out can save you from loosing mission critical servers. Environmental monitors like the temperature and humidity, airflow, smoke and water sensors can be used to make sure that the environment that your systems operate in are the best they can be.
Now, I know what you are saying, “Jim’s just a salesman and wants you to buy something.” Although I might get excited about a product and preach its goodness, I am not a sales person . I might dream of being the star of a Shamtastic infomercial, but trust me, I’m not. What I do want you to know, is that there are some simple things that you can to to help save your hardware.
- Your server room is not a storage area! If it is, it really shouldn’t be. Extra stuff in the room can cause heat issues and possibly be a fire hazard. Keep the area clean and free of obstacles.
- Manage your cables properly. I had a boss who had a hang up on making sure the all cables were organized correctly. You guessed it, I didn’t think it was all that important. In hindsight, I was wrong. Keeping them organized is great for physical management, but more importantly, it makes it easier to manage airflow. Be it a cable tunnel or just pulling them together with a zip tie, making sure your servers get the correct ventilation is important.
- Have a physical maintenance window for your machines. It might bring you back to youthful A+ days, but making sure the servers are dust free and cables are in the correct place can help immensely.
- Monitor the servers health with an SNMP Trending app. Most servers can give you CPU, Server Temp, Fan Info and other valuable information, via a simple SNMP walk. A SNMP trending application, like Denika, will allow you to gather historical information on this data and alert on it.
- Monitor your environment. As I mentioned before, monitoring the room temp, humidity and airflow will make your admin life a lot easier. If you have some room in your budget, this might be the best way to spend it.
So there it is. I guess the old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” is correct. Even in today’s super digital world!
- Jimmy D
Five major data center outages reported last week
Filed under: Data Center, SensorProbes, power monitoring, smoke detector
The website Data Center Knowledge recently published an alarming report about five major data center outages that occurred in the past week. Here is a brief breakdown from the article.
- “On Monday June 29, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) experienced a power outage at its Dallas data center that left several areas of the facility without power for about 45 minutes, knocking many popular customer web sites offline.
- “Early Thursday Equinix Inc. (EQIX) data centers in Sydney, Australia and Paris each experienced power failures. While the power outages were brief – Equinix said the Sydney event lasted 12 minutes while power was restored in Paris in just one minute – many key customer sites took considerably longer to recover their systems. The Sydney event led to disruptions for VoIP service in parts of Australia, while the Paris outage caused downtime for the popular video site DailyMotion and the French portal for hosting firm ClaraNet.
- “Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform, had lengthy performance problems on Thursday, experiencing high latency and data loss.
- “A fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle late Thursday night left many of the building’s data centers without power. The fire in an basement-level electrical room triggered sprinklers and caused extensive damage to generators and electrical equipment. The damage left tenants with backup plans offline for hours, and those without backup sites down until temporary generators restored power early Saturday morning. The biggest impact was at payment gateway Authorize.net, which was offline for more than 12 hours, leaving its merchant customers unable to process credit card sales. Other sites experiencing lengthy downtime included AdHost, GeoCaching and Microsoft’s Bing Travel.
- “Early Sunday, July 5, a fire at 151 Front Street, the major carrier hotel in Toronto, knocked out power on several floors of the facility used by Peer 1 networks. Power was restored in about 3 hours, after a damaged UPS unit was bypassed.”
The author, Rich Miller then goes on to point out some tough questions and the lessons learned from these outages.
Although it is surprising that data centers of this size can experience an outage like this, what is even more surprising is that it all happened in a week’s span. I wonder, is the National Security Agency going to look into this?
The equipment used to monitor this size data center is monumental, but even the smallest IT department can obtain economically priced sensor equipment, like the Bitsight8, combined with Intelligent Sensors, like the AC Voltage Detector and the Digital Voltometer.
The SensorProbe can Tweet!
Filed under: environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, temperature monitoring
I don’t want to ride on the coat tails of Jon’s post about being able to send temperature alerts via Skype, but I guess I have no choice. I quickly wanted to point out that you can also send Twitter alerts form your SensorProbe. I imagined this as a second wave alert. Kinda that last ditch effort before the ship goes down. Ok, maybe I am being a bit over dramatic but in reality, this can be a great way to do a broadcast alert.
The process is easy. Browse to TwitterMail, insert your twitter username and password to get your TwitterMail address instantly. Then go to your SensorProbe and create an email alert. Alert goes off, email is sent and Twitter is fed. Make sure that everyone that is supposed to recive these messages are followers of your Twitter account.
Recommended Server Room Temperature and your Ravica SensorProbes
Filed under: Intelligent Sensors, environmental monitoring, temperature monitoring
Today’s network meetings subject was “Recommended Server Room Temperature”. It appears that our new goal is to make sure that the server farm keeps its temperature at a constant rate. They used the network operations policy for University of California, San Diego as an example. It’s funny, but nobody knew what that temperature should be.
After some research, I found out that the general recommendations suggest that you should not go below 10°C (50°F) or above 28°C (82°F). This is a wide range, remember these are the extremes. It is far more common for server rooms to maintain a temperature around 20-21°C (68-71°F). Keeping it at that temperature can be difficult, there are many variables to address.
I am going to set the thermostat at 55°F and monitor it’s status throughout the day with our Bitsight8 and multiple temperature and humidity probes. I have 20 days to gather this data and report on it. My guess is that we will have to adjust the set temperature a bit before we make the network policy.
~ Jimmy D
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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Why is that iPhone on my network?
Using Ravica environmental monitoring products can help protect your network from the physical world but what about the new mobile world? Can your protect your network from the Smartphone cloud? Smartphones are all around us. The advent of the iPhone had brought their use to the forefront of the IT department. As a result there use has burdened the corporate network and become a big security risk. You can’t ignore the growth, recent surveys show that smartphone use is rising and should grow by 25% in the next three years.
So what do you do?
The influx of smartphones also creates a host of challenges for any IT pro seeking to manage that rapidly growing portion of the enterprise. Armed with the right information and tools, you can make sure that the true potential of a highly mobile workforce is realized.
Dawn the correct armor.
A smartphone can operate inside and outside of your firewall, similar to a laptop. Since you are using smaller operating system, and in some cases unique, your job becomes a little more difficult. So that means making sure your smartphone connections are secure is priority number one. I found a great article that explains how to secure your smartphones and the data that they access. Here is a similar white paper from ZDNET.
Manage your army:
So how do we manage smartphones when they are on and off of your network? Matt Bancroft from Smartphone Security Magazine tells us that, “like the laptops of remote workers, smartphones need to be catered to as a part of the network and subject to corporate management and security measures. It is essential that companies have a corporate IT management policy in place that takes these smart mobile devices into account.”
Three things IT departments must consider when smartphones are running enterprise applications are:
- Operational Continuity: Once employees are trained and start to rely on the applications on their phones, you need to make sure that they are running all the time. This means controlling the phone’s firmware and the other applications that run on it to ensure that it has 100% up time.
- Reducing Support Costs: You need to be able to take control of phones remotely or push files when needed. This can be extremely helpful.
- Security and Compliance: This includes backups to ensure data can’t be lost, and encryption or remote device wiping to protect data when a device is stolen or misplaced. It may also include communications controls, such as archiving SMS messages or preventing them altogether.
Management tools include Sybase with iAnywhere (for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm OS and Symbian), Logmein (for Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry shortly), and Microsoft with its Mobile Device Manager 2008 module, which is part of its System Center family of management products for devices running Windows Mobile 6.1.
Here are some items that you want to look for in your management application.
- Active Directory/Group Policy domain join
- Mobile VPN with dual-factor authenticated access
- Application allow and deny
- SMS, Bluetooth and camera disablement with Active Directory Group Policy-based targeting
- Over the air device provisioning and software deployment
- Device inventory and reporting
- Help desk console and role-based administration
- Device wipe
It’s clear that smartphones are becoming a more integral part of most enterprises. Today’s technology workers are more tech-savvy than ever The influx of smartphones also creates a host of challenges for any IT pro seeking to manage that rapidly growing portion of the enterprise. But armed with the right information and tools, you can make sure that the true potential of a highly mobile workforce is realized.
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Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!
Follow me on Twitter
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