Make your IT Cabinet part of the IoT world with a Rack+ Solution
In today’s connected world, even your computer cabinet itself should be part of the IoT. Deploying a smart rack solution with IP based monitoring gives you the ability to be on-top of your data center situation by monitoring on an individual cabinet level.
Accurate monitoring not only allows you to react to alerts when something isn’t quite right, but also fine-tune your data center on a cabinet by cabinet basis to ensure it is running as efficiently as possible.
Smart rack solutions typically involve the installation of one or all of the following:
- Temperature and Humidity Sensors
- Cabinet Level Access Control
- Power Monitoring
- Power Switching
- UPS Battery Monitoring
AKCP, the worlds oldest and largest supplier of SNMP based monitoring systems, provides a compete Rack+ system that can be customized to suit the level of monitoring you need.
Thermal Maps
AKCP Thermal Map Sensors come in two versions. Temperature only, or Temperature and Humidity. These unique sensors monitor the temperature at the top, middle and bottom of your cabinet, thus allowing you to detect potential hot spots or problem areas in your cabinet. Simply monitoring the temperature at one point is not enough to determine if you are efficiently cooling all the devices in your cabinet. Install thermal maps at the air inlet of the cabinet to check you are taking in the sufficiently cool air, and also place them at the rear exhaust of the cabinet to ensure that the exhaust temperatures are not too high. A high exhaust air temperature could indicate a problem inside your cabinet such as cable blockage of cooling air.
RFID Cabinet Locks
Physical access is an often overlooked aspect of data center security. However, it is a fact that many security breaches come from within, from those people with direct access to the cabinets. By installing RFID Cabinet Locks you are able to determine who has access to a cabinet, at what time they can access and also review cabinet access data. Receive alarms should a cabinet be left unsecured and with IP camera integration review video footage from the event. RFID access control systems provide a complete audit trail as to who accessed what cabinet, and when.
Power Monitoring
Monitoring power consumption in your cabinet is an important aspect of data center management. By knowing your power consumption you can check how close you may be to tripping a circuit breaker, ensure uptime of the data center and that you are not overloading a cabinets power supply. Ideal also for planning data center expansion or installations of new servers, you can identify which cabinets have sufficient power overhead to support more devices. In a co-located data center facility power monitoring of cabinets allows you to bill individual clients.
In Cabinet Fire Suppression
The deployment of gas suppression systems in your data center can be a very costly, and sometimes lethal, event. Avoid the situation escalating this far by using the AKCP Patent Pending In Cabinet Fire Suppression System. By installing our smoke detector in each cabinet, together with an in-line power relay on the main power supply, we can shut down the power to an individual cabinet the moment smoke is detected. This shutting down of the power cuts the energy source of the fire and will in most cases prevent the escalation of the fire, containing the shut down to a single cabinet, and avoiding the deployment of data center wide gas suppression systems.
UPS Battery Management
AKCP has virtual sensors, which allows the monitoring of third-party devices such as a UPS battery system via SNMP. Monitor battery levels, drain rates and create actions based on certain conditions. When battery levels get critical you can begin to automatically shut down none essential equipment, shedding load and preserving your core systems.