Chris Gaskins, Vice President, product development, RF Code looks at the emerging best practice of wire-free environmental monitoring

A number of factors have spurred the move toward the green data centre: from budgetary concerns about the rising cost of heating and cooling to environmental issues such as the desire to run more energy efficient facilities and reduce the carbon footprint.  Regardless of one’s green motives, however, Accenture, a leading global consulting, technology and outsourcing company reminds that “…  Escalating the business’s green credentials while simultaneously increasing process efficiency is fundamental to ensuring the business is sustainable in every sense.”  (Green IT: beyond the data center. How IT can contribute to the environmental agenda across and beyond the business, by Stephen Nunn.)

Environmental monitoring is one of those long-standing best practices that has played and continues to play a key role in helping data centres meet both goals Accenture mentions.  But even stalwart practices need a refresh. What is new is the advancement of this best practice technologically: from an expensive to deploy and manage tethered approach to the emergence of today’s wire-free solutions.  Now that wire-free solutions have literally cut the cord, eliminating the cable running from energy source to environmental sensor, data center managers now have the freedom to deploy environmental monitoring wherever and whenever the situation demands—and much more affordably then traditional solutions.

Why is that so important? It’s no secret heating and cooling costs are the biggest budget items for a data centre, outpacing by far equipment cost. As the classic approach to cooling (cold, cold, cold) becomes too expensive to sustain, data centers are looking to reduce their energy costs by turning up the heat. But how hot is too hot? This is the multi-million pound question because the viability of data center assets—the investments they represent, the business operations they run and the data they house—are at risk if the answer is wrong. 

Since you can’t control what you can’t monitor, environmental monitoring is arguably a best practice in helping to determine appropriate temperatures. But older monitoring technologies are proving limited in providing dynamic, up-to-the-minute information about all environmental micro and macro spots within the facility.

Why are older technologies inadequate to the meeting the needs of today’s “green minded” data centres? Because they are too tethered to the nearest cable outlet, which limits deployment flexibility, and too costly to deploy everywhere.

That’s why  back-in-the-day monitoring is giving way to a new breed of wire-free solutions. These can be quickly deployed proactively and responsively to monitor changing environmental conditions—anywhere within the facility—to provide the fine grained level of monitoring that will help to determine how most cost effectively and environmentally “warm” to run your data centre.

Sometimes, such wire-free solutions go about providing better micro monitoring in unusual ways. For example, a new breed of wire-free liquid detection sensors made of thin film can be placed easily anywhere water will collect, including under raised floors where condensation from chiller pipes collects. Such sensors can be wrapped around pipes or laid down or around areas that are water prone. Think how expensive it would be to run cabling the length of the subfloor. Yet, condensation needs to be monitored because excessive amounts can indicate a problem—maybe a freeze in the line. If a chiller has to work overtime to cool because of such a problem, or even stop cooling, then efforts to manage temperatures calibrations are for naught. This is especially painful if the cost of the initial cabling of an entire subfloor kept you from monitoring condensation there. 
Ask yourself: do you put such sensors where it’s easiest to lay cable cheaply or should you put them everywhere you need them?

Today’s new wire-free environmental monitoring solutions allow you to do the latter. In fact, such new solutions are not only better micromonitors of environmental conditions, they’re much more affordable as well.  Plus, they can augment your existing environmental monitoring solution so there’s no rip and replace.

As the need to better manage power, heating and cooling costs propels the need to take a greener approach, an old best practice has adapted to take on the challenge. More streamlined, more affordable, much easier to deploy, and more capable of providing the complete coverage data centres need, wire-free environmental monitoring is taking an old best practice and making it new again.