In today’s digital age, an organization’s IT infrastructure is increasingly critical for conducting day-to-day business. Protecting your IT infrastructure investment from environmental risks is as important as ever.
What is Environmental Monitoring?
Environmental monitoring systems enable you to actively monitor the conditions of your IT infrastructure. Environmental conditions include extreme temperatures, humidity, power spikes and surges, water leaks, smoke, and even physical access. With proper environmental monitoring, you are alerted to any condition that could have an adverse effect on your mission-critical equipment.
Types of Environmental Monitoring
Environmental monitoring can identify extreme temperatures, humidity, water leaks or flooding, smoke, fire, and other environmental conditions to ensure maximum reliability and functionality. Monitoring activity helps protect mission-critical equipment from failure and prevent a decrease in performance or data loss.
Temperature Monitoring:
- Temperature monitoring warns IT administrators in the event of temperature peaks above equipment thresholds. It is critical to ensure equipment performance is not impacted by excessive temperature.
Humidity Monitoring:
- Most electronic components are designed to operate within a specific humidity range. High humidity environments can cause disk drives to fail, causing loss of data and downtime. Low humidity environments increase the risk of electrostatic discharge (ESD), which can cause immediate and catastrophic failure of electronic components.
Motion Detection:
- Many server rooms are often left unattended. Motion detectors are a simple and affordable way for IT administrators to be alerted of all activity in the server room.
Smoke Detection:
- Dedicated server room or data center smoke detectors ensure that IT administrators are informed as quickly as possible in the event of a fire to start implementing an emergency recovery response to minimize total downtime.
Benefits of Environmental Monitoring Systems
Increase Uptime and Reliability:
- Minimize downtime by being alerted about conditions that cause damage to servers and other network devices.
Minimize Response Time:
- Built-in notifications like email, phone, SMS text alerts, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps, enable employees to quickly respond to environmental issues that may arise.
Reduced IT Investment:
- Real-time environment data can be used to prevent or lessen the impact of IT systems and equipment outages.
With popular environmental monitoring solutions such as those from AVTECH, Black Box, Vertiv, and Monnit, you can stay in the know and react to issues early, before they cause interruptions to your business.
