The network is everything these days – in terms of business operations and communications and everything else. Now more than ever, temperature monitoring is vital when it comes to business continuity for several reasons.

 

“In almost every organization, the IT infrastructure supports the operation’s ongoing activities. Expensive IT equipment is at the heart of this and remains prone to serious problems that can be caused by temperature extremes,” said Michael Sigourney (News - Alert), senior product specialist at AVTECH Software.

 

As Sigourney explained in a recent interview with TMCnet, most people think of temperature problems in terms of overheating, but in today’s world, as a result of the changes of the last five years, people are putting more and more cooling in, and you have problems with things getting too cold. Both overheating and overcooling are major problems and should be avoided because they stress equipment and they lower the processor performance.

 

For example, for every 18 degrees above 85, a processor can lose about 50 percent of its reliability and drop in performance, according to Intel (News - Alert) data. You need to stay within a certain range of temperature in order to get maximum utility of your equipment.

 

According to Sigourney, almost every major computer vendor you can name – including IBM, HP, Dell (News - Alert), Intel, AMD, Cisco, EMC, Liebert, Emerson, APC, AVTECH – will tell you to never run your IT equipment in an environment where the temperature is above 85 degrees. This is the industry agreed “blue line” where once crossed, you start to damage expensive IT equipment and lower its mean time between failures, he said.

 

“Unfortunately, IT managers tend to inherit their computer rooms – they’re tasked to expand them at a moment’s notice, and what happens is these managers are often using existing space and equipment to keeps costs low,” Sigourney explained. “They’re plugging racks and computer servers and systems and disks and video monitoring for security wherever they have space available. The problem is that there is a lack of planning that creates a greater risk. We all do it because every business operates in real-time and the demands on our people change at a moment’s notice.”

“I believe monitoring is critical because these threats are invisible – you can’t see then coming, you can’t plan for them because things change,” Sigourney said. “You need to be prepared for the unexpected and that’s really what AVTECH is all about.”

 

According to Forrester (News - Alert) Research, a reactive approach is not only cost-ineffective, but it also results in too much downtime, therefore the IT analysts recommend automation as the answer. There are three primary functional components managers should expect and demand from an IT environment monitoring solution, according to AVTECH officials. These include: monitoring, alerting and automatic response.

 

From small telecom rooms to the largest of data centers, AVTECH has approximately 100,000 users worldwide and has plans to roll out new models both at the high end of their product line, as well as the entry-level.

 

“Our commitment is ongoing though not just to the hardware, one of the things that we do every year is we improve or upgrade improvements to the software four to six times a year,” Sigourney added. “The product side is going to see a lot of change this year as we feel it does every year. We’re not married to our existing models; we really try to look to the future.”

 

On the other side of the business, Sigourney said he foresees big changes in terms of how AVTECH works with both customers and resellers including a reseller portal coming online that supports over 2,600 resellers across 104 countries. “Resellers are obviously very important to us because they support a lot of our customers,” he said.