Making the Case for Remote Power Supply Monitoring

For reasons spanning everything from security to economics, it now makes more sense to remotely monitor power supplies inside data center facilities than ever.

Rather than replacing batteries based on a three-year budget cycle that is applied as a rule of thumb by most organizations, remote monitoring enables IT organizations to determine which batteries are still operating at peak performance levels regardless of how old they are, Wirth said. More often than not those batteries are operating at a level of performance that doesn’t require them to be replaced for four to five years.

A proactive approach to IT maintenance based on predictive analytics winds up saving IT organizations money, Edward Wirth, director of business development, marketing and sales for Power Service Concepts, a provider of battery environment support services, said. Wirth is speaking on the subject at the upcoming Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland, this September.

Wirth said remote monitoring also addresses a number of tactical issues. Gaining access to data centers has become increasingly problematic for third-party specialists. Background checks are now routinely required, and the time slots being made available to those third-party specialists are usually now on the weekends or after normal business hours.

Remote monitoring eliminates a lot of administrative headaches associated with having to provide clearance to third-party maintenance workers that often get paid overtime to visit data center sites afterhours, Wirth said.

“Ever since 9/11, gaining access to data centers has become a real pain,” he said. “Continuous monitoring provides 24/7 views that reduce the number of physical visits that need to be made to the data center.

Wirth said the biggest issue in making the shift to continuous remote monitoring is the “break-fix” culture that still permeates IT environments. Instead of taking a proactive approach to IT management, there is still a tendency to wait for something to break and then fix it. IT organizations need to realzie that ultimately countinuous preventative maintenance winds up being much less expensive.

In other words, an ounce of prevention is not only worth a pound of proverbial cure; it generally winds up being a whole lot less intrusive for all concerned.

For more information, sign up for Data Center World National Harbor, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Edward’s session titled “AC and DC Critical Power Supply Monitoring Systems.”