Monitoring

Maintaining constant uptime is often crucial to an organisation, with the success of the IT department defined by its ability to provide services to its clients 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Properly designed data centres and computer rooms will have redundant hardware such as UPS, air-conditioning and generators and these should be constantly monitored so that any faults can be dealt with before they affect the running of the IT services.

Parameters that are monitored should include:

• Air temperature and humidity with alert set points for cold and hot aisle, open or contained areas
• Status of UPS’s, CRAC units and generators
• Fire systems
• Leaks and/or water ingress
• Entry and exit of personnel

Monitoring of the above will give early warning of potential issues allowing preventative action to be taken.

Notification of Alerts

As well as recording conditions and allowing real time viewing of systems locally and via the internet, the monitoring system can provide active notification of critical alarms using a range of technologies including:

• SNMP
• Email
• SMS
• Web interface

Format

Environmental Monitoring Systems (EMS) are available in a variety of formats, from those which are an integral part of the overall Building Management System (BMS) to stand-alone single U rack mountable units. Systems developed specifically for data centres include Jacarta’s Interceptor and APC’s InfraStruxure Manager.