Data Centers are critical to the world’s online services. Although their importance is growing, many businesses still maintain small server rooms for their in-house IT services. Server room environmental monitoring is critical to ensure uptime and reduced maintenance costs.
Protecting the critical assets against extremes of temperature, humidity, power spikes, water leaks, and smoke is essential. This can only be done through the implementation of a proper environmental monitoring system. This will alert you to conditions that exceed pre-defined thresholds and which may cause adverse effects on your mission-critical equipment. In addition to environmental monitoring physical security is also important. Monitoring systems such as those from AKCP combine server room environmental monitoring with physical security.
The environmental monitoring system connects with your data center network for remote monitoring and alerts. The AKCP monitoring system is fully SNMP compliant, making easy integration to network management systems and DCIM software solutions. Traditional word sensor solutions rely on a base unit or hub, that the sensors plugin too. AKCP sensorProbe, sensorProbe+, and securityProbe base units are an example of this. Compatible with a wide range of environmental, power, and security monitoring sensors.
Wireless solutions that use WiFi, Zigbee, and LoRa are also available. AKCP has leveraged LoRa radio technology to build our Wireless Tunnel™ system. This provides a low-power, reliable, professional sensor solution. The first LoRa based environmental monitoring solution tailored specifically for the needs of the data center and server rooms.
Why Deploy a Server Room Environmental Monitoring System?
Data
You can’t monitor and improve what you can’t monitor. Deploying a server room environmental monitoring system allows you to collect data from attached sensors. Temperature, humidity, airflow, dry contact status, motion detectors, power, can all be measured. The data is stored and graphed for analysis.
Alerts and Notifications
On your NMS or the base unit Web UI, sensor thresholds can be set. These thresholds define the value at which the sensor should register an alarm condition. When thresholds are breached an alert or notification can be sent from the system. This could take the form of an SNMP trap, e-mail, SMS, or a visual audio alert with a siren and strobe sensor.
Types of Server Room Environmental Monitoring
Server room environmental monitoring can be comprised of monitoring of temperature, humidity, fluids, leaks, smoke, fire, and other environmental parameters to ensure maximum reliability while lowering cooling costs and achieving greener IT. Such activity helps protect mission-critical equipment from failure and prevents a decrease in performance, intermittent failures, total equipment failure, and data loss.
Server Room Temperature Monitoring
Server room temperature monitoring is the automated process that is put in place to warn IT administrators in case server room temperature rises above a certain level. It’s a critical task to ensure the performance of the server is not disturbed by excessive room temperature.
Server Room Humidity Monitoring
Most electronic components are designed to operate within a specific humidity range. Whereas high humidity environments can cause disk drives to fail, causing loss of data and downtime, low humidity environments increase the risk of electrostatic discharge (ESD), which can cause immediate and catastrophic failure of electronic components.
Server Room Motion Detection
Many server rooms are left unattended after hours, or even during the day. Other employees may unintentionally sabotage the server room by leaving a door open. Installing motion detectors is a simple and affordable way for IT staff to keep aware and to get alerted of all activity in the server room.
Server Room Smoke Detection
Additional smoke detectors in the server room will ensure IT staff has as much notice as possible in the event of a fire. This allows responsible personnel to begin implementing disaster recovery procedures as early as possible, minimizing overall downtime.
Server Room Camera Surveillance
CCTV cameras are a great way to provide security for the server room. They not only provide video footage of specific events like door opens, motion detection, etc, they also act as a visual deterrent to criminals. The clear sharp pictures can be sent to IT staff anywhere via e-mail, FTP, MMS, or streamed directly to a cell phone.
