PCA SKIN® Selects Phoenix NAP Data Center for Disaster Recovery Location

- Katelyn Helgemoe, Communications Coordinator with Phoenix NAP, says:

PCA SKIN®, an industry leader in the development of effective professional skin treatments, has selected Phoenix NAP, full service data center, premier infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider and primary network access point (NAP) for its hosting needs.

Initially the innovative skin treatment provider will be utilizing the Phoenix NAP data center for its disaster recovery (DR) site and may eventually transition production servers in the facility in the future. 

“We are happy to work with a company that shares the same customer service standards we do and understands our business needs.” says Adam Sankey, PCA SKIN®’s systems administrator.

Utilizing data center space for disaster recovery has been steadily increasing in the Phoenix metro area, especially with the city’s extremely minimal to non-existent risk of natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, or catastrophic hail, making it one of the safest-from-natural-disaster cities in the United States. Additionally, recent events along the East Coast and the impact of Sandy have drawn more attention to the importance of having a disaster recovery or business continuity solution in place. 

However, the disaster recovery aspects of the Arizona data center were only part of the reason PCA SKIN made the decision. Phoenix NAP’s competitive pricing and customer service were also noted as significant motivating factors in the selection process.

“We are excited to welcome PCA SKIN® into our data center,” said Ian McClarty, president of Phoenix NAP. “PCA SKIN®’s strong commitment and passion for presenting innovative products and solutions combined with its drive for excellence in customer satisfaction is completely in line with Phoenix NAP and we look forward to building a long-lasting relationship with them.”

Phoenix NAP is a PCI DSS Validated Service Provider and a SOC Type 2 audited data center facility that has served the colocation and dedicated hosting industry since 2010. Additionally, the company has been offering cloud solutions since late 2011.

Product Highlight: AVTECH Ships New Room Alert 3E Environment Monitor

At $145 The New Model Provides Advanced Features, Small Footprint & Extreme Value

AVTECH Software,Inc. announces the release of Room Alert 3E, the newest model in their line of temperature and environment monitors. Room Alert 3E is the smallest, most light weight and inexpensive model of Room Alert to date. At just 2 ounces and a size of 3-5/8" L x 1-3/4" W x 1" H, Room Alert 3E offers special features standard on AVTECH's top of the line models, is priced at just $145 and fits in your pocket. It includes a built-in digital temperature sensor, a digital port allowing connection of any digital sensor or a Light Tower & Relay Adapter, as well as a switch sensor channel that allows connection of any switch sensor or dry contact. Room Alert 3E is Power over Ethernet (PoE) enabled although can also be powered by one of AVTECH's 5v 1A power adapters (just $15). Room Alert 3E comes complete with a factory reset button, built-in firmware for monitoring without a PC, AVTECH's Device ManageR application software for advanced network-wide monitoring, an SNMP MIB that allows monitoring by any SNMP enabled monitoring software, a printed User's Guide & Reference Manual, two (2) years of Maintenance Support & Update Service (MSUS) and a 30 day no questions asked return policy.

 "When the combined features and functions are mapped against its $145 list price and small footprint," says Michael Sigourney, AVTECH's Sr Product Specialist, "the Room Alert 3E offers the greatest overall value in environment monitoring and an immediate return on investment (ROI) the very first time it alerts managers about a threatening disaster."

By using Room Alert 3E with Device ManageR, users have full access to advanced features that include network-wide monitoring from anywhere world-wide via the web, unlimited alerting,automated corrective action response, secure data logging that meets regulatory requirements, one clickdata export to multiple file types, real-time graphing, customized & scheduled automatic reporting, personalized dashboard interfaces, notification via voice or GSM (satellite) modems, automatic update notifications, unlimited alert thresholds, unlimited users, monitoring of unlimited cameras, multi cameradisplays within a single window, unlimited technical support, and AVTECH's 100% hardware replacement guarantee. 

"The overall value of Room Alert 3E extends AVTECH's position as the leader in IT & facilities monitoring over the last twelve years," says Sigourney. "Since 1988, we've developed a customer base of over 100,000 users across 106 countries. We're proud to offer a solution that pushes the envelope for full functionality at a price anyone can afford."

Room Alert 3E is a perfect solution for installations where a small footprint is required, there is no access to electric power, when investment funds are minimal or deployment volume is high. It is also the least cost host available to support an AVTECH Light Tower, Light Tower w/Audio or Relay Switch Sensor. AVTECH Light Towers or Relay Switch Sensors can be shared network-wide with any and all Room Alert or TemPageR monitors, as well as any and all Axis network cameras via Device ManageR. Early acceptance is very strong, especially where there is a need to monitor locations like telecom closets, remote facilities, mobile installations like ships and jets where size and weight matter, and in large quantity installations such as a college campus, warehouse, cold storage, grow farm, museum and more.

Room Alert 3E product information was published on AVTECH's website and online store a week ago and shipping began Monday, October 22nd. In the first week, Room Alert 3E is already selling at higher volumes than any other Room Alert monitor. AVTECH expects this new model to eventually outsell all other models combined. This is because the monitoring power is significant and the cost is well within anyone's budget or level of authority. Some early customers are referring to Room Alert 3E as the USB killer because the value, ease-of-use, and installation is so much easier than USB based temperature monitors that require agents, in person installation, and have limitations as to where they can be installed. Installation of Room Alert 3E is as easy as connecting it to your PoE network and then opening AVTECH's powerful Device ManageR software. The monitor is automatically discovered and the user can then set a static IP address and immediately configure Room Alert 3E for use in minutes.

Download Product Brochure

AVTECH, based in Warren, Rhode Island, develops and manufactures hardware and software solutions designed to monitor environmental conditions and protect computer rooms, IT data centers and facilities of all types and sizes. Their Room Alert products allow easy remote monitoring of environmental conditions that include temperature and humidity extremes, power interruptions and failures, HVAC air flow, flooding and water leakage, smoke & fire, unauthorized room entry, security cameras and similar conditions that can reek havoc on expensive equipment and property of all types if left unchecked. Once a problem is detected, AVTECH products immediately notify managers and staff via today's most advanced mobile technologies, enabling a quick response and automatic corrective action. This allows organization's to avoid or minimize downtime, costly hardware replacement and other related expenses. Customers include over 86% of the Fortune 1000, all branches of the U.S. government and military, all 50 state governments and organizations of all types and sizes.

- Davide Ortisi, marketing director at datacenter firm AST Modular (www.astmodular.com), says:

Major Russian telco operator Vimpelcom has released details for the delivey of a large scale modular cloud data center in the Yaroslavl region, Russia. The new data center will feature technology from Spanish datacenter firm AST Modular. The large-scale data center – whose first module’s delivery is set for early 2013 – consists of 6 modular customized rooms covering 3000 m2, with modules accommodating up to 1200 racks of equipment.

The datacenter will use AST Modular’s Natural Free Cooling technology with an expected cooling PUE of 1.09. NFC will allow Vimpelcom to dramatically reduce energy consumption and achieve great levels of security and reliability by avoiding airflow contamination.

The modular design by AST offers certified protection from fire, water, thermal effects, unauthorized intrusion and complies with all critical parameters in accordance with European and world standards. Each module can be quickly filled with IT equipment and comissioned indipendently without the need of waiting for completion of the entire facility. The datacenter has indeed been designed in order to scale along with Vimpelcom’s future business needs, thus minimizing upfront Capex.

This is the first Vimpelcom’s modular datacenter and will complement a portfolio of 16 bricks & mortar facilities which cover a total area of 17000 m2 split across Moscow, the Far East, Siberia, the Urals and the Volga region.

Part of Beeline’s group, Vimpelcom is one of the largest telecommunication and cloud operator in Russia. VimpelCom’s representative Anna Slastennikova declared: “The new data center is a key asset which will allow us to continue the technological development, optimize the existing network architecture and develop a line of cloud services according to our regional growth plan. We see demand for these services in the Russian market and Vimpelcom is actively working on the development of cloud solutions in Russia.”

"The modular data center construction model offered by AST Modular is very flexible and meets our objectives of improving opex whilst reducing construction time and datacenter power consumption” – added Vitaly Zadorozhnyi, director of operational risk at VimpelCom.

AST Modular is working together with its Russian partner LANIT to deliver the project. Valery Şincariuc, vice president of LANIT and Henry Daunert, CEO AST Modular jointly stated: "We are pioneering a new era in building data centers in Russia. Our modular datacenter solution is scalable, environmentally friendly and it reduces time-to-market. Modularity looks like one of the most promising approach in the field of high-tech data centers in Russia today."

Data Center Detour: The Quickest Route to Energy Transparency and Efficiency

- Mark Davidson, sustainability officer with JouleX (www.joulex.net), says:

Due to the Internet and information age explosion in the mid 1990s, there has been a rapid expansion of data centers. To address the explosive growth of applications and IT services, more and more data centers have been built, expanded, and utilized during the last decade and a half. With this growth in data centers, energy consumption has also soared to unheard of levels—and shows no signs of slowing.

According to The White House Office of Management and Budget: “The need for backup power supplies, environmental controls (air conditioning, fire suppression, etc.) and special security devices means that data centers can consume 200 times as much electricity as standard office spaces.”

Recent research from the Uptime Institute indicates more than a third (36 percent) of data center facilities will run out of space, power, or cooling, or all the above in 2011 or 2012. Of those that will run out of one or more data center lifelines, 40 percent plan to build a new data center, 62 percent plan to consolidate servers, and 29 percent plan to lease collocation space.

In order to meet these growing demands for more computing power, data center and IT managers are turning to consolidation, virtualization, and hardware upgrades. This evolution in the industry is also highlighting the need to measure energy use and effectiveness.

To Date, Energy Measurement Has Been Expensive and Risky
While the need for accurate energy measurement has long been acknowledged by industry leaders, the tools available have been both costly and inadequate. Energy assessments and measurement of electrical loads have typically been measured through traditional power meters, measuring actual plug loads. The process of deploying meters and measuring individual devices is very time-consuming and expensive. This can even be an extremely risky endeavor since many meters have to be in-line to the devices they are monitoring and require infrastructure to be taken offline for installation.

Data centers have been unable to measure energy reduction and carbon emissions reductions related to data center consolidation, virtualization and capital equipment upgrade projects because of the inability to realistically measure energy on individual assets in an efficient way. With no way for data centers to measure and report the effectiveness of these projects, their success can only be approximated.

Adhere to Best Practices When Deploying Energy Management Solutions
When implementing any energy management solution, data center and IT managers should adhere to a number of best practices in order to successfully address the challenges they face today:

Deployment

• No impact to the current network configuration
• Fast and inexpensive deployment
• Automated device discovery
• Device agnostic – must work with every device in the data center, including legacy equipment

Reporting

• Comprehensive visibility by data center, row, rack, slot, virtual machine, or physical device
• Fully customizable reporting on energy consumption, utilization, costs, savings and carbon emissions by device, location, cost center, division and time of day

Business Implications

• Quick time to benefit
• Three to six month ROI
• Assist data center consolidation, virtualization, and cloud projects
• Assist data center energy capacity planning
• Support corporate sustainability initiatives for energy and carbon reduction
• Reduce energy consumption and costs in the data center, while meeting Service Level Agreements (SLA), without impeding performance

JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) for Data Centers is a solution designed to these best- practices specifications.

An Agentless Approach Offers Quicker Time to Benefit, Shorter Deployments and Less Hassles
By using a network-based approach, JEM for Data Centers does not require installation of device-side software, network re-configuration, or hardware meters. This means quicker time-to-benefit, significantly lower deployment time, and no hassles with maintenance, configuration, or patches.

JEM for Data Centers leverages standard network protocols to retrieve and control energy, acting as a Virtual Smart Meter. Data center and IT managers can now query energy information without the need for physical instrumentation from:

• Legacy data center IT assets such as servers, network appliances, switches, and routers; or
• Facilities devices such as power distribution units (PDUs), computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units, and more.

JEM for Data Centers conducts the Virtual Smart Metering through an agentless discovery of all IT and facilities assets connected to the network. Through this discovery process, JouleX is able to utilize asset information, system utilization, and performance details to dynamically calculate energy consumption on a per-device basis. This agentless process:

• Minimizes deployment costs (human resources, service disruption, change management)
• Decreases capital costs (physical metering)
• Reduces time to value from weeks/months to hours/days

Other key benefits include:

• Powerful analytics help quantify, justify, and prioritize energy savings and carbon reduction savings of data center consolidation, virtualization, server retirement, equipment refresh/upgrade projects.
• Alerting capabilities set thresholds to signal for power, utilization, and temperature conditions.
• A policy engine provides advanced control capabilities such as Power Capping servers (regulating the amount of energy drawn by a server) and managing power profiles to optimize performance and energy.
• An extensible platform manages, analyzes, and controls energy from any distributed office device or system connected to the network—including those where software agents cannot be installed, such as virtual servers, virtual desktops, desktop monitors, VoIP phones, and printers.

Join History in the Making as a Newly Empowered Data Center Professional

Energy is now the fastest growing expense in the data center so it only makes sense for data center operators to start monitoring and measuring their energy utilization and consumption in order to optimize energy usage, drive efficiency and reduce costs. However, there’s often a disconnect between what Accounting and Operations see as priorities when it comes to budget planning.

JouleX is empowering data center professionals by putting a previously unheard of amount of reporting and control at their fingertips. For the first time in history, IT has the ability to quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively measure and report actual energy and emissions reductions of their virtualization, consolidation, and infrastructure upgrades. The agentless approach puts data centers on the quickest path to energy transparency and efficiency with little impact to IT or facilities operational staff or service levels. It offers the most direct route to cost-savings and tangible ROI—helping move energy management up to the top of a CFO’s priority list.

Understanding Data Center Sustainability

- Brian Brickhouse, senior vice president and general manager with (Eaton Electrical) Eaton Corporation (www.eaton.com), says:

For most organizations today, doing business in ecologically-responsible ways is a higher priority than ever. As governments enact strict new regulations and awareness grows of issues such as global warming and pollution, more and more businesses are taking aggressive action to lighten their environmental impact. Along the way, they’re discovering that operating sustainably can be good not just for the planet but for the bottom line as well.

However, for a variety of practical and financial reasons, many companies find achieving sustainability in their data centers challenging. The following explores the benefits of operating a sustainable data center and then discusses concrete strategies that IT and facilities managers can use to save water, energy and natural resources, reduce environmental harm and improve indoor air quality.

In an ecological context, sustainable practices are those that allow present generations to meet their needs without impairing the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Sustainable systems preserve and promote the long-term well-being of our planet’s environment, inhabitants and natural resources by avoiding waste and limiting production of greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants.

A sustainable data center is one that uses materials and processes aimed at minimizing the facility’s impact on both human and environmental health. This applies to all aspects of data center construction and operation, from design and site selection to hardware procurement and administration to power and cooling practices.

Furthermore, achieving true data center sustainability means using infrastructure products that are sustainable across their entire lifecycle. That is, from acquisition of raw materials to manufacturing, use and disposal, every component of every piece of hardware in the data center should do as little damage as possible to human health and the natural world.

Business benefits of a sustainable data center
Though sustainability is a worthwhile goal in its own right, building a sustainable data center also delivers tangible and significant business benefits, including these:

Financial savings: An environmentally-responsible enterprise is an efficient one as well. Sustainably-run data centers consume less energy, water and space, reducing both capital and operational expenses. In addition, many local utilities and national governments offer tax breaks and other financial incentives to organizations that use power and other resources efficiently.

Enhanced public reputation: To a steadily increasing degree, consumers and organizations today expect the companies they buy from to demonstrate environmental stewardship in their business practices. Data centers in particular have come under heightened public scrutiny in recent years due to the amount of power and water they use. Organizations that make visible efforts to reduce their consumption of natural resources are likely to win praise from customers and investors. Companies that don’t can expect to receive criticism that may damage their image and profitability.

Implementing Sustainable Data Center Practices
IT and facilities managers who wish to bring sustainability to the data center have access to a wide range of effective and affordable strategies. The Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification process offers a useful framework for organizing those strategies. LEED is a standard for environmentally sustainable construction created by the U.S. Green Building Council, a non-profit organization that promotes energy-efficient architecture. To earn LEED certification, buildings must exhibit environmental responsibility in five areas:

• Sustainable sites
• Water efficiency
• Energy and atmosphere
• Materials and resources
• Indoor environmental quality

Conclusion
Most organizations today want to do business sustainably, but find achieving that goal in their data centers difficult. Fortunately, practicing sustainable site development, reducing water and energy consumption and using fewer harmful materials are all practical options for improving the environmental responsibility of your IT operations.

Some of these strategies are still experimental, require heavy upfront investments or come with significant potential drawbacks. Most, however, are proven, cost-effective and relatively simple. By investigating and adopting such practices today, companies can save money, enhance their corporate image and help keep the planet we all share clean and healthy for future generations.

Environmental Monitoring: Rethink Your Data Center Strategy

- David Schirmacher, chief strategy officer for FieldView Solutions (www.fieldviewsolutions.com), says:

While managing a data center operation has always been a complex proposition, over the past several years we have seen a real shift in the operational dynamic. Unprecedented growth in data processing requirements and evolving IT hardware technologies along with updated environmental criteria are forcing organizations to rethink their data center strategy. Rapidly increasing capital, operational, and energy expense are driving the industry to create the metrics necessary to quantify, and ultimately drive performance.

Industry organizations such as the 7x24 Exchange, ASHRAE, The Green Grid, and the Uptime Institute continue to both enhance and expand the metrics necessary to measure performance. Metrics such as PUE, DCIE, CUE, WUE, RCI, etc. are becoming part of the vernacular. ASHRAE is about to release the 3rd revision of their TC9.9 data center environmental standard. This revision broadens the permitted environmental criteria allowing operators more flexibility in configuring their mechanical systems to achieve increased energy efficiency, and in some instances, increased capacity. It will also address the increasingly common use of 100% air side economization. Inadequate environmental monitoring will make it difficult to fully measure performance and validate the effectiveness of implementing many of the recently defined best practices.

The government is also very engaged. In recent years, both the EPA and DOE have been hard at work creating the means to measure and quantifying data center performance. The EPA has added a data center category to its very successful Energy Star Portfolio Manager and the DOE has introduced the DCPro software tool to assist data center operators in quantifying performance. To date, these efforts have focused around a “carrot” approach designed to equip operators with the tools to define performance and encourage continuous improvement. It doesn’t take much of a leap to predict where the industry is heading. With the increased focus on efficiency and environmental responsibility the road to a regulation is unlikely to be very long. If you’re a global operator then you are already dealing with regulation. For example, the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment imposes steep penalties on operators of inefficient data centers.

The good news is that implementing a well designed environmental monitoring program can be one of the best investments you can make. Not only can it help data center operators significantly reduce energy expenses, it can assist in deploying their IT more effectively. Data center operators are finding that the right monitoring tool can help identify and release “stranded” capacity i.e., unusable capacity due to unbalanced deployment of IT hardware. Reduced operational Service Level Agreements (SLA) and greatly lowered risk of creating unintended hot spots are other key benefits.

Where should Environmental Monitoring rank in terms of overall priority in the data center?

If you adhere to the adage “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” then implementing a comprehensive monitoring program should be high on your list of priorities. This is particularly true in the complex environment of the data center where even small performance discrepancies can result in major operational inefficiencies that send energy expenses skyrocketing unnecessarily. In addition, you could well compromise equipment lifecycles and worse, increase the probability of an unplanned outage.

The biggest challenges for data center and IT managers when it comes to Environmental Monitoring.

Lack of meaningful data is probably the single biggest obstacle to driving data center performance. Without good data it is virtually impossible to manage a data center to achieve the best possible performance.

A typical enterprise data center will have a number of monitoring systems installed. In almost every case you will find a Building Management System (BMS) that provides monitoring and control of the core mechanical systems. Often you will find an Electrical Power Management System (EPMS) along with dedicated monitoring systems for the Uninterruptable Power System (UPS), the Emergency Power System (EPS), and an assortment of other specialized monitoring systems. All of these systems provide very important functions and most are considered essential to the operation of the facility.

So with all of these monitoring systems installed, why has the industry struggled to get the information necessary to drive data center performance? There are a number of reasons. First, the vast majority of these systems are not designed specifically for the unique requirements of a data center. In fact, if you were to compare a BMS system installed at a data center with one installed at an office building or university, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference. While these systems do a fantastic job at managing individual systems and components, they are rarely effective at providing end-to-end performance management data.

Second, while there may be numerous systems installed at a facility, there is typically little or no communication of data across these systems. Data is often stranded “off network” on complex and proprietary systems, with access restricted to the facilities team. Allowing access to personnel who are not trained in the operation of chillers, generators, UPS equipment, etc. can be very risky as these systems have the ability to shut equipment down. Further, making sense of all of the raw data provided by these systems can be a tedious undertaking. While knowing the speed of a chilled water pump is important to a plant operator, this information would not be useful to an IT manager trying to decide where to best deploy equipment.

Third, traditional monitoring and control systems rarely store the data that is being monitored. They operate much like the thermostat in your house that is continuously monitoring the environment and controlling the cooling systems to maintain a stable environment. While it does this job really well, if you wanted to see a trend of the temperature in your house over the past year you would be out of luck. While it is certainly possible to set up and record data for specific conditions on a BMS system, these systems are not designed to record the volume of information necessary to provide meaningful trends of end-to-end data center performance over the long term. A typical mid to large size data center might have upwards of 30,000 data points to be recorded if you include monitoring of power to the rack level. If you were to capture this data at one minute intervals and store it for a year, you would be processing upwards of 15 billion records. Even a modern BMS system would stall with this type of volume.

Overcome those challenges.

First you have to properly define the challenge. Managing data center environmental performance is not about wires, black box devices, monitoring hardware or the vast array of specialty devices that are increasingly being pitched as cure-alls. It is about managing data, all of the data, IT asset and system data; space utilization data; MEP system resiliency and performance data; energy, financial and environmental data. Unless you have access to all of this data your performance picture will be incomplete. While much of this data may already be available it is often stranded across multiple proprietary systems. Identifying what is available and where information gaps exist is core to establishing a best practice performance management process.

Over the past year or so a new class of software known as Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software has been defined. A number of established data center software players along with a number of start-up firms have aligned themselves with this designation. The intent of DCIM software is to fill the previously mentioned information gaps. As there is not yet a definitive specification for the segment, there is a wide gap of features and capabilities across the various products. Unfortunately there is also a lot of hype around many of the offerings. It is critically important for data center operators who are looking at deploying this type of solution to do the proper amount of due diligence to ensure they find a solution that fits their needs.

Advice for IT and data center managers.

As previously stated, it is important to do your homework. As you begin the selection process take the time to identify the issues that you want the solution to address. Who will be the primary user(s) of the tool? What are they trying to accomplish? It sounds simple, however you would be surprised at how often choices are made based on how “cool” the graphics may look. Conversely you will find organizations that will write a specification that tries to include every last feature they can think of whether they need it or not. They will spend a lot of time and dollars to deploy a solution only to find that few in their organization have the time commitment necessary to use all of the features.

If your focus is environmental performance, energy management, efficient IT equipment deployment, capacity management, etc. then make sure the solution you choose can extract and manage the volume of data necessary to achieve this. Sounds simple, but very few actually can do what they promise. When you’re dealing with power and cooling information that is constantly changing, the data collection and analysis challenge can be staggering. For example, take a small operation of about 1000 servers. Assume that each server has two plugs to monitor. Add in rack level temperature monitoring plus the ability to monitor the core power and cooling infrastructure and you could easily reach 3000 measurement points. Since these points are changing continuously assume that you are going to measure and store a value for each data point at a frequency of once per minute. That’s over 1.5 billion measurements per year! Few systems can manage this volume of data let alone provide intelligent and meaningful analysis both in real-time and when historical trending is required.

Accessibility to the information is another major hurdle for most solution providers. Is the solution a true browser based application that allows full access to anyone on the network? Most are not despite what their marketing material may say. Often you are either forced to install client software on each desktop or you are forced to remote into the application through a browser which often results in limited functionality.

Lastly, how does the application grow with your firm? Can the solution handle the scale of your growth? When adding new data center facilities to the system are you starting from scratch or is it a simple matter of adding the new facility to the existing application? The ability to look at all of the data centers in your portfolio in a clear and consistent manner regardless of scale or design should be a core requirement.

When you look at recent industry surveys it is not unusual to find that a significant percentage of respondents say that they are not measuring their performance. All too often, decisions to build new, or upgrade existing facilities to increase capacity or efficiency, are made based on incomplete and often inaccurate data. Even worse, they are often made under time pressure to deliver new capacity quickly. Having a right-sized environmental program in place not only helps you manage your existing capacity, it ensures that you have access to the information necessary to make smart business decisions when planning for the future.

Increasing Uptime with Improved Environmental Monitoring

- Mo Sheikh, spokesperson for ITWatchDogs (www.itwatchdogs.com), says:

Workers and customers, empowered by smartphones and widely available Wi-Fi services, want and are demanding 24x7 access to email, company network resources, and Web sites. And thanks to today’s global marketplace, even small companies must support round-the-clock activities.

Unfortunately, IT system downtime remains a problem for companies of all sizes. A 2010 eWEEK article1 reporting on an industry study noted that North American businesses suffer an average of 10 hours of IT downtime annually. The article went on to note that this downtime costs small companies about $55,000 in revenue each year, while large companies lose about $1 million per year.

To avoid the problems that can cause downtime, companies need to closely observe server room environmental conditions and be alerted when problems arise. This is an area where ITWatchDogs environmental monitoring solutions can help.

Examining the Causes of Downtime

Several data center environmental factors can contribute to or increase downtime and service disruptions.

Heat can be a killer. Extreme heat buildup can fry a server, knocking it offline and perhaps damaging it permanently. Even moderate heat buildup can have an impact. Equipment failure rate doubles for every increase of 18 degrees Fahrenheit, according to studies done by the high performance computing researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Increased failure rate due to prolonged heating has also been noted by the Uptime Institute and others.

When it comes to monitoring temperature, it is not good enough simply to nail a thermostat to the wall. Since the temperature can vary drastically around different pieces of equipment, you should consider placing separate temperature probes within indi-vidual racks or critical devices. That way, problems with a broken fan or an air-conditioning failure will show up quickly. Similarly, you might be able to identify a server that is overheating due to it running excessive workload.

To take nuances into account, ITWatchDogs environmental monitors are designed for today’s crowded server rooms. They are small, ranging in size from only 4 inches long up to the largest models that are rack mountable at 19in/1U. The devices can run off of existing electrical power outlets, and many support Power over Ethernet (POE).

The monitors have built-in Web servers and use standard networking protocols, including TCP/IP and HTTP. This allows server-room administrators and their technical staff to monitor temperatures over an Ethernet network or remotely via the Web from anywhere. The information is presented in a manner that allows quick inspection of current temperatures, as well as historical data to help spot heating pattern trends. Finally, all of their environmental monitors are capable of sending alerts via SNMP traps, email, and SMS messages. Some devices can also trigger an external phone dialer to provide voice call alerts up to nine phone numbers, when pre-defined thresholds are exceeded.

Other server-room environments can cause downtime problems, and need comparable monitoring and alerting capabilities.

Humidity is another major threat. The reason: Humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air, and too much water vapor can form condensation on electronic components, leading to electrical shorts. If the humidity is too low, there is an increased chance of damage from electrostatic discharge. In either case, uncontrolled humidity can severely damage critical server components, causing the server to crash and shutting down access to applications and data.

Unfortunately, humidity is one of the trickiest environmental characteristics of a server room to measure and, as such, requires very close attention.

To measure humidity, most companies have focused on relative humidity. In fact, for years the guidelines followed were based on recommendations of the Ameri¬can Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). The group suggested that the relative humidity for computer rooms be within the 40 percent to 55 percent range. However, because relative humidity varies with temperature, ASHRAE now recommends that data centers measure absolute humidity, expressed as the dew point (it should fall within 41.9 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit).

As was the case with temperature measurements, humidity can vary significantly within a data center. So sensors must be placed throughout the room and server racks.

Water in a server room is never good news. Whether the source is a leaking or burst pipe, or a flood, water can easily shut down an entire organization. Examples include:

• A water main break in Texas took down the computer systems in the Dallas County Records Building. According to The Dallas Morning News,2 this “[crippled] operations for almost the entire county government.”
• Rains flooded a T-Mobile data center in the Pacific Northwest, taking down servers supporting the company’s service activation portals and web sites.

Water is usually measured using a cable that is run under an equipment room’s raised floor. When water comes in contact with the cable, an alarm is triggered.

Pro-active water monitoring should make use of sensors capable of detecting the presence of water over a large area so remedial action can be taken before it shorts out equipment.
A less frequent cause of downtime is fire and smoke. In 2008, a fire destroyed 75 servers, routers and switches in a Green Bay data center, according to Data Center Knowledge.4 Smaller fires and smoke from equipment or frayed wires can trigger fire-suppression systems which, while much better today at safeguarding equipment, can still cause damage to IT equipment.

To detect fire and smoke requires more than traditional building smoke alarms. The problem is that when they sense smoke there may be no one around to hear it. What’s needed is an alarm that connects to web-enabled environmental monitors. In this way, the smoke alarm works as it normally does, but its alert can now be sent via a SNMP trap, e-mail, SMS, and/or voice call to multiple IT staff members.

ITWatchDogs environmental monitors come equipped with various on-board sensors along with digital and analog inputs for external sensors, including tempera¬ture, humidity, water, smoke, and fire to name a few. The environmental monitors provide a way to remotely monitor server room conditions, view historical data to spot trends, and receive alerts when conditions exceed pre-defined thresholds. The information provided by ITWatchDogs environmental monitors can help a server room staff:

• Notice changing conditions and take preemptive action to prevent downtime
• Spot troublesome fluctuations and anomalies that might contribute to downtime
• Receive alerts when conditions warrant immediate attention.

Furthermore, ITWatchDogs climate monitors can be configured to display video feeds from up to four IP network cameras. The interface provides a quick view of remote conditions along with environmental measurements when logged in. For a manager working remotely or at home over the weekend, secure access to the interface is perfect to see who’s in the server room and check what’s going on from time to time. Upon alarm, a quick glance can also help determine if a trip to the facility is required or not.

And finally, when it comes to server room downtime, the elephant in the room is power outages. Power outages are the leading cause of downtime. Certainly, short outages can be covered with properly configured UPS systems. However, in some cases, a UPS might further contribute to equipment failure if it leaves servers running while the A/C remains off.

Naturally, if the power outage is longer-term for instance, a severe winter storm tears down power lines – knowledge of the extent of the power failure is essential so that backup plans can be initiated.

For power monitoring, ITWatchDogs offers the Remote Power Manger X2 (RPM X2). This adds remote power monitoring and switching capabilities to any ITWatchDogs environment monitors supporting a digital sensor port. The add-on accessory presents real time logging and graphing of voltage, amperage, real power, apparent power, power factor and kilowatt-hour to provide trend analysis and power metrics for future planning. The device enables users to set alarm thresholds for these measurements and it can remotely reboot locked systems or control system power via the secure user interface.

Your Technology Partner

To increase IT system availability, organizations need to take a proactive approach to monitoring the environmental conditions that contribute to downtime and disruptions.

Certainly, for years IT equipment such as servers, switches, and storage devices have had temperature and fan sensors, as well as software to send alerts when temperatures rise or a fan fails. But in many cases, these systems only notify you once a problem is severe. Additionally, these monitors only give you information about an individual device.

Proactively monitoring conditions in the entire server room or data center helps identify issues before they turn into a problem. This allows time to rectify matters before equipment deteriorates or fails.

ITWatchDogs offers a wide range of environmental monitors providing cost effective ways for server-room managers and their staffs to proactively monitor their IT infrastructure and maintain system uptime. The products provide a quick and easy way to keep an eye on remote conditions from a secure web interface and receive alert notifications when specified alarm thresholds are exceeded. The interface displays live video feeds and environmen-tal measurements including temperature, humidity, air flow, light, sound, power, water detection, and more. The measurements are logged and graphed for viewing trend patterns. External processes or applications can be automated on an alarm trigger or remotely through the web interface with units supporting output-relay control or with the Remote Power Manager X2.4

ITWatchDogs’ climate monitors use standard Web server software to display their measurements and camera feeds. All management and monitoring tools are accessible securely via Ethernet or the Internet; no software installation is required. The monitors have SNMP agent software to integrate with popular networking management tools, and they support SNMP v1, v2c, and v3.

Most importantly, the ITWatchDogs line of products provide the pro-active monitoring needed to maintain high availability in today’s data centers and equipment rooms.

* ITWatchDogs is a regular contributor on Data Center POST

1 “IT Outages Cause Businesses $26.5 Billion in Lost Revenue Each Year, Survey,” eWEEK, December 10, 2010 http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/IT-Outages-Cause-Businesses-265-Billion-in-Lost-Revenue-Each-Year-Survey-280492/

2 “Water main break cripples Dallas County computers, operations,” The Dallas Morning News, June 2, 2010 http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-countyflood_02met.ART0.State.Edition2.295d6ee.html

3 “T-Mobile Down Due to Flooding?” BRG.com, December 4, 2007 http://www.bgr.com/2007/12/04/t-mobile-down-due-to-flooding/

4 “Fire Destroys Wisconsin Data Center,” Data Center Knowledge, March 31, 2008 http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/03/31/fire-destroys-wisconsin-data-center/3 

Environmental Protection for Large Data Centers

- Mo Sheikh, spokesperson for ITWatchDogs (www.itwatchdogs.com), says:

The dynamic nature of today’s virtualized data centers presents new environmental monitoring challenges


The combination of today’s powerful servers with the wide-scale adoption of virtualization is radically changing the way companies must monitor their data centers.

The consequences when problems arise are very high. While the loss of a single system in a smaller server room is cause for concern, a single data-center blade server failure in a large organization might take down multiple applications running as virtual instances on that piece of hardware.

Besides the higher stakes in the case of a problem, monitoring conditions in a large data center are much more complex than they have ever been before.

In a traditional server room, workloads are fairly predictable, and thus heat generation patterns, while variable throughout a rack, are often understandable. For example, increased workloads in the early morn¬ing — when everyone is launching applications — may routinely increase server heat output.

However, in today’s large data centers, workloads are much more dynamic. With virtualization, IT managers can easily move instances of an application from one physical server to another. So a server that has been relatively idle for hours might suddenly be running at 90 percent CPU utilization in just a couple of minutes.

Many of today’s computing environments virtualize the entire server fleet in the data center, allowing an IT manager to shift workloads not just from server to server in a rack, but also from row to row.

A Problem’s Impact Multiplies

As a result of these newer approaches to data-center management, conditions throughout the facility are highly variable. And more is at risk.

Unlike the traditional server room, where the loss of a single server might only take one application offline, equipment failure in a large data center due to environ¬mental problems such as excess heat, water, humidity, smoke, fire, or a power failure can bring business to a halt for an entire department or the whole organization.

What’s needed is a sophisticated monitoring and surveillance solution to track environmental changes, identify anomalies, and send alerts when thresholds have been exceeded. The solution must give managers information about their data centers at a very granular level, so a spike in environmental conditions in a single rack can be identified quickly to head off a potential problem.

The bottom line is that in today’s data centers, rather than merely reacting to shutdowns when they occur, you need to be proactive in trying to anticipate them before they happen. This is an area where ITWatchDogs environmental monitoring solutions can help.

Monitoring Data Center Environmentals

Several data center environmental factors can contrib¬ute to or increase downtime and service disruptions. And as noted earlier, it is becoming harder to monitor these conditions due to the very dynamic nature of today’s data centers.

A system that has run cool for months can instantly show a spike in output heat if a manager shifts multiple virtualized workloads onto it all at once. An increase of 18° Fahrenheit (10° Celsius), can double equipment failure rates over time. Since the workload shifts can be very precise (from, say, shelf 1 in rack 2 of row 3 to shelf 5 in rack 4 of row 8), you need separate temperature probes on individual racks and critical devices. That way, problems with a broken fan or air-conditioning failure will show up quickly. Similarly, you might be able to identify a server that is overheat¬ing due to its increased workload.

ITWatchDogs takes into account the space limitations in today’s densely packed equipment racks. Its environ-mental monitors are small, ranging in size from compact models only 4 inches long and about the size of a large candy bar, up to full-sized 19” rack-mountable models which, despite all of the features packed into them, only take up a single 1U space in a rack. The devices can run off of existing electrical power outlets, and several models also support Power over Ethernet (POE).

When it comes to other environmental conditions, in addition to temperature, ITWatchDogs’ monitors come equipped with various on-board sensors along with digital and analog inputs for external sensors, in¬cluding humidity, water, smoke, and fire. The environ¬mental monitors provide a way to remotely monitor data-center conditions, view historical data to spot trends, and receive alerts when conditions exceed pre-defined thresholds.

With comprehensive monitoring in place, a spike in operating temperature due to a shifted workload, a buildup of condensation in a single rack, or exces¬sive humidity along a row of equipment will be noticed quickly. To make that information available to the ap¬propriate data center staff, ITWatchDogs probes can be monitored via any standard Web browser, without requiring you to install any proprietary software on a host PC to access the monitoring units.

Additionally, ITWatchDogs offers power monitoring. This is accomplished using the Remote Power Manger X2 (RPM X2). The RPM X2 adds remote power moni¬toring and switching capabilities to any ITWatchDogs environment monitors which have one or more digital sensor ports available. The device enables users to set alarm thresholds for these measurements, and also allow the user to remotely power-cycle alocked-up system to reboot it or to turn equipment off and on via the secure user interface.

Your Technology Partner

To address the highly dynamic nature of today’s data centers, organizations need to take a proactive ap¬proach to monitoring the environmental conditions that contribute to downtime and disruptions.

ITWatchDogs offers a wide range of environmental monitors providing cost effective ways for data center staff to proactively monitor their IT infrastructure and maintain system uptime. The products provide a quick and easy way to keep an eye on remote condi¬tions from a secure web interface and receive SNMP, E-mail, or text-message alerts when specified alarm thresholds are exceeded. The interface displays live video feeds and environmental measurements includ¬ing temperature, humidity, air flow, light, sound, power, water detection, and much more. The measurements are logged and graphed for viewing trend patterns. External processes or applications can be automated on trigger of an alarm or remotely through the web interface with units supporting output relay control or with the Remote Power Manager X2.3

* ITWatchDogs is a regular contributor on Data Center POST

How to Protect Your Data Center from Environmental Threats

- Mo Sheikh, spokesperson for ITWatchDogs (www.itwatchdogs.com), says:

Introduction: Physical Dangers Just as Important as Cyber-Threats


Viruses, spyware, and network threats get most of the attention, but environmental factors like heat, humidity, airflow, smoke, and electricity can be equally devastating to server room equipment, and thus to a company’s IT operations.

To get a sense of the danger, let’s take overheating as an example. Servers generate high levels of heat, and the facility must be kept cool to ensure optimal performance. The warmer it gets, the more likely equipment will overheat and malfunction. In fact, an increase from 68°F (20°C) to 86°F (30°C) can reduce the long-term reliability of electronic equipment by as much as 50 percent. And when air conditioning fails, temperature can skyrocket in a matter of minutes. In February 2009, Duke University Professor of Physics Robert G. Brown explained that heat weakens electronic components like power supplies, motherboards, and memory chips, so even if they don’t fail immediately, they become more susceptible to failure over time.

“The one time our server room overheated drastically, reaching 85° to 95°F (30-35°C) for an extended period of time…we had node crashes galore, and a string (literally) of hardware failures over the next three months— some immediate and obviously due to immediate overheating, some a week later, two weeks later, four weeks later,” Brown writes.

In this post, we’ll discuss the danger that environmental threats post to server room equipment, outline a comprehensive environmental monitoring strategy, and explain how environmental monitoring products from ITWatchDogs deliver an end-to-end solution for prevention and early detection of environmental issues.

No company is immune

Depending on the size of a company and its industry, downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars per hour. For example, if your Web site is down and visitors choose a competitor, you’ve lost both the immediate transaction and the opportunity for their repeat business. If the outage causes your company to break a service-level agreement with a customer, the associated fees and potential lost business add up quickly.

Every server room and data center—even those of household-name companies and sites—is vulnerable to environmental damage. In March 2010, Wikipedia suffered a two-hour outage when one of its server clusters—located in a European data center—overheated. The company was able to reroute traffic to a North American data center, but a glitch in its DNS server tools caused Wikipedia address resolutions to fail globally. Think about how many users were frustrated by this outage. According to 2008 statistics, Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second. Multiplied by 2 hours, that’s at least 180 million failed requests due to overheated servers.

Lost business aside, you must also consider the cost of replacing expensive servers. In September of 2007, an overheating condition at St James Hospital in Leeds destroyed 1 million pounds’ worth of server equipment. The negative publicity surrounding the incident also impacted the facility’s credibility and public image.

Can your operation afford a large-scale server failure?

What’s clear is that companies of every size must protect their IT investments from environmental threats like overheating, power outages, and excessive moisture—all of which may result from flooding, condensation, leaks, or malfunctioning/poorly-configured air-conditioners.
Smoke conditions can also lead to serious equipment damage, in case alarms are triggered during off hours and personnel aren’t available to remediate or respond quickly. If a smoke alarm triggers an ‘emergency power off’ (EPO) device, for example, cooling systems could go offline and leave servers susceptible to overheating.

Environmental Monitoring Is the Key

In a typical server room, a wall-mounted thermostat measures room temperature and controls the air conditioning. Individual servers now come with built-in temperature sensors that issue alerts if the level of heat surrounding the individual unit rises above a certain threshold, or if an internal fan breaks down. Isn’t that enough to ensure safe operating temperatures?

The short answer is, no. Data center temperatures vary widely from one zone to another. Even if the overall room temperature is 68°F (20°C), the area near the output vents may be 5 degrees cooler, and the area behind server nodes may be 5-10 degrees warmer. Airflow problems could create higher-temperature pockets of still air in some aisles, creating hot spots that can damage sensitive components.

A better approach involves temperature/humidity/airflow sensors installed on or near individual racks and critical devices. Logging and graphing these measurements over time can help administrators spot trends, such as temperature spikes during peak operating hours or fluctuations when the building’s HVAC systems are throttled back on weekends.
With comprehensive monitoring in place, if an internal fan breaks or an air conditioning unit fails, the spike in operating temperature will be noticed quickly. Probes with internal microprocessors are easy to configure and highly reliable. Similar sensors can track humidity and moisture in the air and the floor, and measure the temperature and rate of air flowing along different paths in the server aisles.

Even sound sensors can help in the early detection and remediation of component failures. For example, a fan that is wearing out may get louder over time, which could be spotted at an early stage on a device that graphs relative measurements. A properly calibrated sensor would send out alerts for either condition and help IT staff resolve the issue rapidly.

The benefit of microprocessor-based sensors is that they can be monitored via Web browser, without requiring proprietary software installations. With a Web-enabled monitoring system, you can measure temperature, humidity, airflow, water leaks, power, door/cabinet position and more, setting alert thresholds and escalation schemes in case an anomaly is detected.

Optimal sensor equipment can send alerts in numerous formats, including SNMP

Best Practices for Optimal Monitoring

Heat: An optimal environmental monitoring strategy includes multiple temperature sensors. These should be placed on top, middle, and bottom of individual racks to measure the heat being generated by equipment, and at the air conditioning system’s intake and discharge vents, to measure efficiency. Probes should also be placed around critical devices, because the temperature inside a rack-mounted device could be as much as 20 degrees higher than the surrounding area. A probe near the room’s thermostat can help monitor what the thermostat is ‘seeing’ as it controls the air conditioner.

You can also use a hand-held thermometer to determine where the hottest spots are in the server room, and then set up sensors in those areas to get an ‘early warning’ when temperatures rise.

Once these sensors are in place and being monitored centrally from a browser, emergency alert policies should be set up to ensure that the right personnel are informed of potential problems. Remediation procedures should also be mapped out ahead of time. Service contracts with an air-conditioning repair company ensure rapid response, and you should make sure the company offers 24-hour service.

The logs that track temperature over time are also helpful, in that IT managers can review them over a weekly or monthly span and analyze them for spikes that occur during off hours. In addition, testing the sensors every month is an important step to making sure the system will function properly when an event does occur.

Water: Moisture and humidity sensors should monitor for leaks inside cooling equipment, potential leaks that come from nearby pipes, or water caused by a flood or disaster. Water sensors should be placed at the lowest point (wherever water would tend to puddle) on the floor, and underneath any pipe junctions. Air-conditioning condensation trays should also be equipped with sensors to detect overflow.

Power: Electrical failures can cause air-conditioning equipment to shut down even while an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) ensures that servers stay up and running – a sure recipe for overheating a server room in short order. The best approach is to monitor current coming into the data center, and arrange for an orderly shutdown of IT equipment in case power is knocked out. The hour or two of downtime is far preferable to the widespread device failures that would result from an overheating condition.

Smoke: Smoke alarms can trigger power shutdowns. Also, they’re usually not tied to an alerting system that contacts IT personnel. Alarms may be noticed by facilities managers—or the local fire department—but the maintenance of sensitive server equipment is not their top priority. Here, the best approach is to wire the smoke alarms directly into the climate monitoring and alerting system, essentially extending the functionality of the climate sensors to the smoke alarm.

Doors: A final concern for data center monitoring is unauthorized entry. Dry-contact sensors that detect the opening and closing of a door should be installed at the room entry points and on the doors of server and UPS cabinets. On a busy day, these sensors can send alerts numerous times and present a time-consuming irritation, but managers can configure alerts to account for weekday vs. weekend operations, work hours vs. overnights, and other factors to help reduce the number of alerts sent and pinpoint unusual activities.

IP cameras are another fairly easy component to add to a monitoring solution. They provide real-time surveillance of sensitive areas in the data center and tie into the Web-based console, so administrators can get a first-hand look at the environment wherever they may be.

What to Look For in an Environmental Monitoring Solution

A solid environmental protection solution should include sensors that are easily deployed throughout the data center, connected to a monitor with a built-in Web server for easy access and communication. It should also deliver:

• Secure, browser-based access
• Comprehensive logs and graphical analyses of environmental factors over time
• Multiple account levels, to ensure that IT staffers or clients see only what they’re authorized to see
• Multi-level alarm policies with escalation, so admins can set alert thresholds and contact lists for prompt response
• Multiple notification media, including e-mail, SMS text message, SNMP alerts, and telephone auto-dialer

Requirements aside, the solution should not charge subscription fees for tech support and software updates. A long-term data center management and monitoring solution is critical to preserving your IT investment, but it should not generate recurring expenses that degrade ROI.

The ITWatchDogs Solution

The ITWatchDogs family of monitoring devices provides remote monitoring of environmental parameters in data centers and server rooms. They track temperature, humidity, leaks, power supplies, door position and more. ITWatchDogs’ wide variety of models and options fit different requirements and room sizes, but all are based on standard hardware and software and monitored via a Web browser.

The environmental units are designed to take up very little space; the largest models are 1U high rack-mount units, the smallest is only 4 inches long by 1.5 inches wide and deep. Models with built-in Power over Ethernet (POE) capability are available.

All the products have a wide range of on-board sensors; most models allow 16 or more remote sensors to be connected as well.

All ITWatchDogs’ climate monitors have a built-in Web server that automatically generates sensor data logs and graphs, without any need for external software. All management and monitoring tools are accessible securely via Ethernet or the Internet. The monitors have SNMP agent software to integrate with popular networking management tools, and they support SNMP v1, v2c, and v3. Some models include low-voltage relay outputs that can be used to activate a strobe light, an alarm, a backup air conditioning unit, or an auto-dialer. ITWatchDogs offers highly reliable auto-dialer devices for both GSM and analog phone systems, with their own independent backup-power batteries which allow them to make phone calls to your IT and service personnel even in the event of a power failure.

Lastly, ITWatchDogs stands behind its products, with firmware updates available free on its Web site and technical support available free for life. Support is provided by the same engineers that designed and engineered the devices themselves, so questions and problems are resolved quickly and authoritatively.

Conclusion

Data center equipment is very sensitive and susceptible to environmental damage from excessive heat, moisture, and unauthorized access. Power outages that knock out cooling systems can lead to overheated servers in a matter of minutes.

Simple thermostats and server-based temperature sensors aren’t enough to ensure comprehensive protection. IT organizations need temperature and water sensors throughout the data center and at specific strategic locations near potential trouble spots. They also need door sensors and IP cameras to alert administrators in case of unauthorized entry and provide real-time views of the space. They also need comprehensive management tools to tie the data from these sensors together into a cohesive display, and to set alarm parameters in case a threshold is exceeded.

ITWatchDogs provides a full line of environmental sensors that deliver exceptional protection and alerting functions without requiring any proprietary software installations or update subscriptions. Regardless of your data center’s size or complexity, ITWatchDogs has a cost-effective monitor and sensor solution that will reduce risk and enable smoother IT operations for your company.

To learn more about ITWatchDogs and its line of monitors and sensors, visit www.itwatchdogs.com

* ITWatchDogs is a regular contributor on Data Center POST