Environment Monitoring

A Review of the Xsensior Lite USB Temperature Monitor by Brendan Mulvanney of Sentinel IS.

What effect will installing a new equipment rack have on your existing data centre environment? Will the temperature and humidity levels change?  Will your existing airconditioning system handle the load? Have you introduced a new hot spot in the data centre?  Where do you place the measuring equipment to get accurate readings?

As supplied,  the opening page of the web interface on the AKCP securityProbe shows details of the manufacturer, AKCP, the company logo, and the product name. All these details can be changed using a series of SNMP commands.

A breakdown of the status factors to measure and record for each Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC) unit in your computer room, data centre or server room. The paper also gives a justification for why you should record each status factor and what you should do with the information once you've recorded it.

An outline of the various options you have when you are choosing a server room thermometer including the pros and cons of each

An introduction to ethernet thermometers giving an overview of their uses as well as their advantages and disadvantages.

The creation of "server farms" comprising hundreds of individual file servers has become quite commonplace in the new e-commerce economy, while other businesses spawn farms by moving equipment previously in closets or under desktops into a centralized data center environment. However, many of these farms are hastily planned and implemented as the needed equipment must be quickly installed on a rush schedule. The typical result is a somewhat haphazard layout on the raised floor that can have disastrous consequences due to environment temperature disparities. Unfortunatley, this lack of floor-layout planning is not apparent until after serious reliability problems have already occurred.

Any organisation involved in the preparation or storage of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat or fish has a legal obligation to demonstrate "due diligence". Managers need to ensure that there are food safety systems implemented within the organisation in order to maintain and be able to prove the highest levels of quality and safety at all times. Continuous, networked environmental monitoring can help ensure that such standards are monitored and maintained.

Today’s Servers generate vast amounts of heat. If you do not monitor your computer room temperature you could cause irreparable damage to your computers and to your business.

The following is an excerpt from a reply by Robert G. Brown, Duke University first posted on www.beowulf.org. Just how crucial adequate air conditioning is, the relative costs, and the fall-out he experienced for months after an AC failure is clearly illustrated.

The Environmental Monitor EM1 addresses wetness monitoring in a more sophisticated way than most wetness monitoring products. The Sensatronics range of probes do not just alarm on wet or not wet conditions, rather there is a wetness scale from 1 to 100, representing different levels of ’wetness’. The scale is an arbitrary one and may vary slightly from one probe to another but it is none the less useful as a guide to the degree of wetness. Setting a level too high may result in false alarms if humidity is high, so typically a value of around 40 would be used to trigger an alert.