Don't overlook real-time climate monitoring in the data center

A report published by MarketsandMarkets predicted that the data center cooling industry will earn over $8 billion in annual revenues in 2018. While big tech companies will invest large amounts of money in groundbreaking cooling technology, there are many opportunities to make cooling more efficient through reorganization. Tiny updates to the data center's infrastructure can go a long way toward improving the overall performance of the facility, but isolating the sources of energy waste can be difficult. By taking a more proactive approach to monitoring climate control across your data center, you and your IT staff will have a much easier time finding and resolving efficiency problems.

Failure to catch climate problems is costly
An article from Datacenter Dynamics warned that IT companies have thrown away millions of dollars by performing climate testing improperly. Much of this waste is caused by miscommunications between IT teams and facility managers, and the consequences of these losses for the environment are dire. Even worse, the cost of poor climate control doubles after a company invests in new tech for optimizing a facility's cooling solutions but the find that measurements made using these devices failed to provide useful data. Several factors, from the arraignment of a facility's racks to basic human error, can hamper attempts to gage the efficiency of your data center. That's why smart companies place a priority in finding monitoring devices that deliver data in direct line with the needs of their IT staff.

The right gear will tell you everything you want to know
Not every piece of climate monitoring tech is a right fit for each data center. After all, different facilities have widely different set-up and climate control needs - IT teams are best served by choosing monitoring equipment designed specifically to monitor the cooling strategy that the company has invested in. For example, for a facility that utilizes liquid cooling, IT teams need measuring tools that track supply temperature of cooling units, the rate and flow of chilled liquids and the humidity and temperature of the airspace near the facility's racks, said Data Center Knowledge. Such devices can often be made compatible with your current data center infrastructure via a Serial-to-Ethernet converter, making it easy to connect the company's data center to efficiency-boosting peripherals.

Perle's serial to Ethernet converters connect serial based equipment across an Ethernet network. The Perle IOLAN range of Console Servers, Device Servers and Terminal Servers feature built-in support for IPv6 along with a broad range of authentication methods and encryption technologies.