Without trying to push the AKCP solution (I'm sure there may be better ones out there), one of the big benefits
is that it can monitor a range of things depending on what you plug into it. We use them to monitor
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Airflow
- Water (or soon will).
Airflow in particular has been vital. loose the chillers and it takes hours for
our server rooms to hit critical temperature, loose the airflow and we are dead in
20 minutes.
We then monitor the SNMP interface of this little appliance for subcritical and critical
alarms. At subcritical we bleep an operator. At critical we use SNMP to hit the power off
on all our APC distribution units. Critical and subcritical thresholds are setable on the units
via their web interface (which also gives volatile trend information).
Typically we run two monitors per server room - both monitoring temperature and one measuring
humidity and the other airflow. One can then choose to require both at critical before dooing anything drastic.
Although Steve says they are expensive - my recollection is 200-300 pounds each (so the cost is hardly
an enteprise solution. and they are zero effort
for installation (and we could give you the little SNMP code derek wrote to pole for Alarms). I doubt
its worth doing DIY unless you are ambitious and would like to instrument your server room with a sophisticated
grid of sensors. We find they provide what we need at minimal cost and effort.
Regards
Andrew
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of David Martin
> Sent: 29 March 2006 21:33
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Temperature monitoring
>
>
> Hi,
>
> By chance a DIY article "How cool is Perl" by Michael Schilli
> in Issue 55
> of Linux Magazine April 2006 has an article about temperature sensing.
>
> The article is not on the web yet but the gist is
>
> Solder a DS18S20 temperature sensor to a cable with an RJ11
> plug at the
> other end. The plug goes into a DS9490R USB dongle which is
> accessed under
> Linux using sourceforge projects owfs, fuse and swig. The published
> magazine code is already online at
>
> http://www.linux-magazine.com/Magazine/Downloads/65/Perl
>
> Not exactly Data Centre grade but perhaps plausible at smaller sites.
>
> I had previously googled for something to defend our clusters against
> marginal air conditioning and ended up down the road in Stirling.
> See
> http://www.linux-usb-daq.co.uk/howto2/temperature
>
> There are probably lots more alternatives out there
>
> --
> David Martin
>
> Kelvin Building,
> University of Glasgow,
> Glasgow, G12 8QQ,
> United Kingdom
>
> tel: (0)141 330 4197 fax: (0)141 330 5881
> email: [log in to unmask]
>
|