Computer Room Temperature & Environment MonitoringWhy Computer Room Temperature and Environment Monitoring Is Critical
By Rick Grundy
Computer room temperature and environment monitoring is critical to protect systems, servers and equipment from damage and to protect the organization from costly downtime. Extreme temperature changes due to failed heating or cooling equipment, malfunctioning components or even seasonal changes can damage hardware, threaten uptime, block network access, destroy data and be expensive to recover from. Proactively monitoring the data center environment allows situations that could lead to expensive recovery to be addressed quickly and before they cause damage or downtime.
Why Is Environment Monitoring Important?
Computer room environment monitoring is very important because computer and network equipment is only designed to operate effectively within a specified range of environmental conditions. If these conditions are exceeded, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic results can occur such as hard drive failures, power supply failures, CPU errors, and more. This can cause system, application, website or network access be reduced or even unavailable if servers or network components fail. Even worse, manufacturers of computer equipment will often not accept responsibility for equipment failures caused by exposure to extreme levels of temperature, humidity, power outage, flooding and various other environmental conditions.
What Are The Most Common Computer Room Environment Issues?
The most common type of environment problem encountered in the computer room or data center is air conditioning failure. This can quickly lead to dangerously high temperatures, high or low humidity, and water flooding. According to various market studies and the experience of many AVTECH Software customers, the most common causes of computer room or data center environment problems are air conditioning and power supply failure.
A simple in-house experiment that you can implement yourself is to switch off the air conditioning in the computer room and observe what happens to the temperature in just a short time. When the temperature in the computer room unexpectedly rises outside of a reasonable range, IT staff need to be alerted immediately. If the room temperature rises to just 85 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature inside a server or rack cabinet can be over 120 degrees! This can be deadly for systems, servers and other network or computer equipment.
One recent study shows almost 75% of sites being down at least half a day because of computer room temperature or environment issues 1-3 times a year... costing from $10,000 to $50,000 per incident for 43% of these organizations. Costs can mount up quickly and easily become staggering for organizations that fail to respond immediately.
How Can I Monitor The Computer Room Environment?
AVTECH Software's Room Alert and TemPageR products are used to monitor environmental conditions in many of the world's most secure data centers and are installed in almost every branch of the US government.
TemPageR is AVTECH Software's "Real-Time Temperature Monitor with Data Logging, SNMP & Unlimited Alerting". It is designed specifically to assist with computer room temperature monitoring in multiple locations simultaneously while logging temperature data for historical review and graphing. TemPageR allows temperature alert notifications via email, email-to-SMS, SNMP and more to devices like computers, mobile phones, pagers and PDAs. TemPageR also offers an easy to use web browser interface for settings changes and the viewing of real-time temperature data from anywhere. Click here to learn more about TemPageR.
Room Alert is a line of AVTECH Software hardware solutions for "Advanced Computer Room Environment Monitoring, Alerting & Automatic Corrective Action". Room Alert models provide an easy, economical & highly reliable way to monitor computer room environment conditions like Temperature, Humidity, Power, Flooding (water), Smoke (fire), Entry (room, window or cabinet), Panic Buttons and more. They allow alert notifications via mobile phone, pager, PDA, email, IM, broadcast, logfile, web page, console update and more. Automatic corrective actions both when a situation develops and resolves to allow a powerful and immediate response. Room Alert products have monitored many of the worlds most important data centers since 1988. Click here to learn more about Room Alert.
Why Choose AVTECH?
AVTECH has designed, tested and proven TemPageR, Room Alert and PageR Enterprise (our advanced network-wide monitoring software included with TemPageR and Room Alert) to be extremely powerful and reliable in real world data centers at some of the biggest facilities in the world. TemPageR and Room Alert are proven methods of protection employed by the Fortune 1000, Pentagon, United Nations, U.S. Government, and businesses large and small. Click here to learn more about AVTECH.
AVTECH Software, Inc.