Best Practices for Colocation
Environmental conditions have a big impact on systems availability and performance. InfraSensing's sensors enable you to monitor if your colocated equipment are running within the limits of industry standards for data centers and server rooms. It enables you to monitor your colocation center's service levels in respect to environment and act on it before it may be too late.
On this page you will find best practices on recommended settings and configurations for monitoring temperature and humidity inside your racks. Click here to download our solution brief with these best practices.
|
When you colocate with a service provider, they provide SLA's to warrant specific environmental conditions in which your equipment will run in their data center. Most companies who colocate will have implemented a complete remote solution for monitoring their systems' availability and performance. However most do not monitor the environmental conditions.
A mistake often made is to only rely on monitoring the conditions at a room level and not at a rack level. When a heat issue arises, air conditioning units will initially try to compensate the problem. This means that with room level temperature monitoring, the issue will only be detected when the running air conditioning units are no longer capable of compensating the heat problem. It may be too late then for your rack. The data center provider may not detect it early enough to safeguard your systems. What is the impact of temperature on your systems? High end systems have auto shutdown capabilities to safeguard themselves against failures when temperature is too high. However before this happens systems will experience computation errors at a CPU level resulting in application errors. Then system cooling (fan) will be stressed reducing equipment life time expectance (and as such their availability and your business continuity). The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recommends no less than 6 temperature sensors per rack in order to safeguard the equipment (top, middle, bottom at front & back of rack). We recommend monitoring temperature per rack at a minimum of 3 points: at the bottom front of the rack to verify the temperature of the cold air arriving to the rack (combined with airflow monitoring); at the top front of the rack to verify if all cold air gets to the top of the rack; and finally one at the top back of the rack which is typically the hottest point of the rack. Intake temperature should be between 18°-27°C / 64°-80°F. Outtake temperature should typically be not more than 20°C / 35°F of the intake temperature. You should also monitor the humidity levels in your colocation center. Humidity has 2 potential impacts on your systems: too dry air will result in the build up of static electricity on the systems. Too humid air will result in corrosion slowly damaging your equipment resulting in permanent equipment failures. |
 PoE / SNMP / Email & SMS Alerts / Web / OLED Display/ IP temperature & humidity sensors from InfraSensing. |
Sensors Deployment ^
| Application | Location | Setting | SKU | Sensor Package |
| Colocation Rack Level Monitoring | ||||
| Sensor to monitor intake temperature | Front - Bottom of rack for room or floor cooling, top of rack for top cooling | 18-27°C / 64-80°F | 311323 | PoE & SNMP SensorGateway with built-in Temperature Sensor |
| Sensor to monitor outtake temperature | Back - Top of rack (hot air climbs) | less than 20°C / 35°F difference from inlet temperature (typically <40°C / 105°F) | 182668 | External temperature probes* |
| Sensor to monitor temperature & humidity | top front of rack to check sufficient intake for all rack and humidity levels within range | Temperature: 18-27°C / 64-80°F Humidity: 40-60% rH | 306166 | Temperature & Humidity Sensor Probe* |
* External probes need to be connected to a SensorGateway (SKU 311323) in order to operate. One SensorGateway has a built-in temperature probe and can support up to 2 external probes.