Keeping Your Data Center Environmentally SecureProactive monitoring of your company’s computer room or data center will eventually save you money, reduce downtime and prevent lost business.
By Michael Sigourney
Imagine walking into your data center one morning, only to find that the room’s air conditioning system has malfunctioned and the temperature is far above pre-set levels. If you’re lucky, the AC can be repaired immediately and before expensive IT equipment or critical information are damaged. Unfortunately, this scenario rarely has a happy ending. Most of the time, expensive equipment and valuable data are destroyed, causing the business process to be brought to a virtual standstill.
For organizations that don’t believe such calamities could ever strike them, consider that 75% of all sites are down at least half a day from one to three times a year because of computer room temperature problems or other environmental issues, according to various statistics. The expense per incident ranges from $10,000 to $50,000 and can mount quickly for organizations that fail to respond appropriately.
Statistics like these serve to emphasize how important it is to monitor the environment in your data center, computer room or other area where IT equipment is housed. It is also important that your IT staff knows immediately when there is a problem so they can respond immediately. An inappropriate environment, coupled with slow or no response, can lead to the damage of hardware, threaten uptime, and prevent network data access. Proactive monitoring, on the other hand, allows your staff to address situations quickly and before they can cause damage or downtime.
Common Environment Issues
As stated earlier, air conditioning failure is the most common environmental problem your company is likely to encounter in the computer room or data center. Other significant threats include power loss, humidity, flood, and smoke damage.
To understand the role air conditioning plays in cooling the environment, switch off the AC in your computer room and observe what happens to the temperature in just a short time. 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.
To avoid problems, you should monitor your data center environment around the clock, especially nights and weekends when staff are not on site. In these situations, it is important to have an environment monitoring system that can notify staff of a problem and perform automatic corrective actions to prevent any further damage to expensive systems, servers or other equipment.
For ultimate reliability, the environment monitoring system should be able to operate completely independent with all status and configuration information available through a web browser. An additional software module that can monitor unlimited environment monitoring units dispersed across the network will add another level of protection, expand alerting options, allow broader monitoring, and enable automatic corrective actions.
If the temperature rises too high, the environment monitoring system should be able to notify staff and automatically start a fan or backup air conditioner, then send a follow-up message when the temperature returns to a normal level. If the temperature continues to rise beyond safe levels, the environment monitoring system should initiate an action like starting a backup and orderly shutdown of servers to prevent the high temperatures from causing expensive damage or longer downtime.
Multiple types of notification and flexible alerting options are also important. At a minimum, the environment monitoring system should be able to send email and text messages to devices such as mobile phones, pagers and PDAs. Dialout paging via TAP or UCP protocols allow text pages to be sent to mobile phones and pagers in situations where the network or mail server has gone down. SNPP paging is gaining popularity as the notification method of choice because of its security and virtually instant delivery to large numbers of recipients over the network without requiring a mail server. Additional notification methods such as audio alerts, SNMP, instant messaging and others add additional flexibility and allow the environment monitoring system to easily integrate with existing work routines.
Taking a proactive approach to protecting your servers, data and other expensive IT equipment will allow your company to avoid some of the many problems that could interrupt or destroy a business. Monitoring for environment conditions like temperature, humidity, power, flood and smoke is where you should begin... these are the 5 biggest threats. Fortunately, these are conditions that a smart, proactive organization can easily and inexpensively monitor. It stands to reason that any prudent and professional IT facility should take advantage of this beneficial technology at the earliest opportunity.
AVTECH Software, Inc.