White Papers for Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA)

Monitoring Physical Threats in the Data Center

American Power Conversion

Traditional methodologies for monitoring the data center environment are no longer sufficient. With technologies such as blade servers driving up cooling demands and regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley driving up data security requirements, the physical environment in the data center must be watched more closely. While well understood protocols exist for monitoring physical devices such as UPS systems, computer room air conditioners, and fire suppression systems, there is a class of distributed monitoring points that is often ignored.

Today’s common techniques for monitoring the data center environment date from the days of centralized mainframes, and include such practices as walking around with thermometers and relying on IT personnel to “feel” the environment of the room. But as data centers continue to evolve with distributed processing and server technologies that are driving up power and cooling demands, the environment must be looked at more closely.

Rising power density and dynamic power variations are the two main drivers forcing changes in the monitoring methodology of IT environments. Blade servers have tremendously increased power densities and dramatically changed the power and cooling dynamics of the surrounding environments. Power management technologies have pushed the ability of servers and communication equipment to vary power draw (and therefore heat dissipation) based on computational load.

View the White Paper

Share or bookmarklet this web page at: