Why All Data Centers Need Environmental Monitoring

Monitoring environmental conditions in the data center, such as temperature and humidity, provides many benefits in the increasingly complex environments of modern data centers. However, many enterprises do not consider the ramifications of poor environmental monitoring practices until they have already experienced a major problem.

There is a saying that “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” By monitoring environmental conditions, data center managers can improve operations in a number of ways. Here are some of the top reasons why all data centers need environmental monitoring:

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• Save money. Cooling costs are one of the biggest concerns of data center managers. Around half the power used in a data center goes towards keeping the equipment cool. By monitoring the temperature in your data center, you can know when to raise temperatures to save energy and prevent overcooling while having confidence that you aren’t overheating sensitive equipment. Likewise, monitoring airflow will allow you to reduce airflow to only what your data center requires. Using environmental sensors can lead to reduced operational costs, deferred capital expenses, and increased capacity for future growth.
• Improve uptime. Uptime is a top priority among data center professionals and equipment failure is one of the leading causes of downtime. Data centers need environmental monitoring to help prevent undercooling, electrostatic discharge, corrosion, short circuits, and other threats to valuable IT devices. Ensure uptime and peace of mind by placing environmental monitoring procedures in your data center to maintain a safe environment.
• Identify issues before they become large problems. Knowing before bad things happen or become catastrophes is invaluable to a data center manager. Environmental monitoring is the key to being ahead of issues before they arise. Use a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution to set environmental thresholds on collected data from sensors and receive real-time alerts for critical and warning conditions. Know when water, smoke, or open cabinet doors are present to address the issue before there is one.
• Maintain maximum energy and resource efficiency. Monitoring the environmental conditions of your data center allows you to be as efficient as possible with energy and resources. Being able to monitor and maintain the right temperature, humidity, air-flow, and all other conditions lets you not only save energy costs but also protects and extends the lifespan of your equipment.
• Monitor the environment you can’t control. Tenants of colocation data centers should be just as aware of their equipment’s environment as their enterprise counterparts. Colocation customers should monitor for changes in temperature, humidity, and all threats of downtime to their servers. By monitoring the environment, you can be alerted to a problem that your colocation provider may not be monitoring for you.
• Get actionable insights about your environment. Data center managers can make smarter, data-driven decisions when environmental monitoring is combined with a second-generation DCIM solution. Data from temperature, humidity, contact closure, leak detection, smoke, air pressure, air flow, and other environmental sensors can be analyzed in real-time with zero-configuration dashboards and reports. DCIM provides intelligent monitoring to maintain the health of your data center.

All data centers need environmental monitoring to identify and mitigate threats. Sunbird’s second-generation DCIM solution radically simplifies environmental monitoring and provides quick and easy insight to help you maximize uptime, save energy, and save money. Sunbird’s DCIM works out of the box with the leading vendors’ environment sensors, environment monitoring aggregators, and intelligent rack PDUs.

Want to see how Sunbird’s industry-leading second-generation DCIM software can help you maintain the health of your data center? Take a test drive today.