Wireless sensors: A potential 'hot' data center trend

Let's be honest: In many companies, green initiatives have as much to do with saving money as saving the planet. But you don't want to reduce energy so much that it compromises the functioning of your data center equipment. Shutdowns and poor operation can be just as costly to the business.

Achieving this delicate balance is tricky, says wireless sensor network maker Arch Rock. To help, the company has just launched its Energy Optimizer-Data Center Edition, a package of wireless sensor nodes, networking gateway and data center monitoring and measurement applications.

What does a real green data center look like?

Like its competitor, SynapSense, Arch Rock measures electrical power, heat, airflow, cooling, temperature, humidity and pressure levels from equipment throughout the data center. Liberally mounting sensors across server racks, power circuits, computer room air conditioners, computer room air handlers and chillers becomes possible with wireless, because it needs no cabling to communicate the data upstream to the monitoring application.

"If you want an air sensor beneath the floor, you just put it there. There's no need to find an Ethernet port," says Nik Simpson, senior analyst in Burton Group's data center strategies practice.

The better visibility you have into consumption and emissions, the better you can balance your energy-conservation efforts with power efficiencies, says Roland Acra, Arch Rock CEO. One reason that this is particularly important now, aside from trying to reduce carbon footprint and save some cash, is that consolidated data centers often mean denser data centers, which are prone to so-called hot spots.

Data center trends like Cisco's unified computing system (UCS) shoehorn computing, networking, storage access and virtualization into a common platform for hardware and real estate efficiencies. But that unified device, by itself, generates more heat than each of many separate devices once did. For example, a rack that once needed a couple of kilowatts of power might suddenly need 20 or 25 kilowatts, which translates into very heavy heat loads.

A West Coast university running a virtual data center that I talked to has recently increased its high-performance computing "tremendously, though the room wasn't originally designed for it," says the data center manager. The university is testing the Arch Rock system to gather more statistics about the environment.

"Next year we'll have a major efficiency upgrade," he explains. "That's why I want the Arch Rock wireless monitoring system in place. I want to be able to measure and show the actual improvement."

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.