Recommended Server Room Temperature and your Ravica SensorProbes
Filed under: environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors, 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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