AVTECH Software, a provider of network monitoring solutions, announced that it has pioneered some of the most popular environment monitoring solutions available, which have been used to monitor the “Big 7” environmental threat factors.

 

The Big 7 are identified as temperature, power, humidity, flood, smoke, air flow, and room entry. These problems can easily bring any IT facility to a complete stop in minutes if they go unaddressed, according to AVTECH's Michael Sigourney (News - Alert).

 

Computer rooms and data centers continue to change in design, form and function. IT devices get smaller and more powerful, allowing users to cram more and more hardware into a single rack. This equipment requires significantly more energy to keep cool. 

Research conducted on these issues suggests that threats from IT environment issues will cost business and industrial organizations somewhere between $50 billion to $100 billion next year in downtime and related costs.

 

AVTECH officials said that last year 23 percent of all data centers experienced downtime more than five times as a result of IT environment issues and 61 percent of the remaining data centers experienced downtime one to four times.

 

Citing Forester Research, Sigourney said that IT environment monitoring is expected to become a $9 billion industry by next year. According to Forester Research, “a reactive approach is not cost effective and incurs too much downtime – automation is the answer.”

 

There are three primary functional components managers should expect and demand from an IT environment monitoring solution. These include: monitoring, alerting and automatic response, according to AVTECH officials.

 

Also, to address the unique requirements at each data center, managers should look for a combination of different solutions rather than a “one solution fits all” approach. Such solutions will give them the greatest flexibility to move the monitoring hardware and sensors around in order to use products most effectively. 

 

Room Alert 24E is a popular environmental monitoring product with built-in and attached sensors monitor real-time temperature, humidity and power while offering 22 external sensor ports for connecting additional digital or switch sensors. Room Alert 24E plugs directly into the network via Ethernet for immediate use and draws only 5V of power via a 110-240V power adapter that works anywhere in the world, the company said.

 

AVTECH bundles two software products with every Room Alert unit at no additional charge. The first is a PageR Enterprise license that allows unlimited alerting by any method, alert hierarchies, scheduling, dependencies, automatic corrective actions and monitoring of any server, device or event across the network.

 

PageR has the power to monitor any server, device or event worldwide across a network and it does this with “no rules” and “no agents,” company officials said.

 

The second software product bundled with Room Alert units is AVTECH’s Device ManageR. This application allows users to monitor and manage an unlimited number of Room Alert and/or TemPageR units from a single window of your favorite Web browser, the company said.

 

Device ManageR detects monitoring devices automatically across a network in seconds, allows firmware updates to one or more units simultaneously, automatically logs all sensor data to an unmodifiable file that meets regulatory concerns and preserves data integrity, allows data export and alerting.

 

Additionally, Device ManageR shows live real-time sensor data and status, allows graphing of one or more sensors simultaneously, discovers units across multiple subnets, and ping other devices and best of all, AVTECH officials said.