Wireless sensors work! And they are ideal for data center environmental monitoring.
Not all wireless sensor solutions are created equal though. But let’s park that for a moment and talk about wired sensors.
The Challenges of Traditional Wired Sensors
Wires make data center environmental monitoring more difficult than it needs to be.
Think about some seemingly simple jobs that are more difficult with wired sensors vs. wireless. Like simply adding a new temperature sensor to get better visibility into an area of the data center:
- Where is the nearest appliance to wire the sensor to?
- Does that appliance have available space to wire the sensor?
- How much wire do I need?
- Do I need to create a job and wait for someone to do the work?
There is already enough wire running through a data center, adding more just compounds the issues:
- Infrastructure complexity: Running wires throughout the data center can add significant expense, especially in large or complex facilities.
- Limits flexibility: Wired sensors are often tied to specific locations, making it difficult to redeploy or reconfigure the monitoring setup as needs change.
- Increased maintenance risk: Cables can be prone to damage or interference, compromising data accuracy and requiring regular checks.
- Hard to scale: Adding more sensors or new sensor types is difficult and time consuming.
Sometimes the simple things get overlooked, like the hassle of removing a door from a rack when the door is wired with sensors. It’s a big time waster.
Some other considerations about wired solutions:
- Takes up rack space: Some solutions require rack mounted appliances. To cover an entire data center many appliances need to be rack mounted.
- The PDU trap: Some solutions use a PDU based add-on controller approach that can lock you into a single PDU vendor, or create compatibility challenges when you aren’t standardized on a single PDU vendor.
Wires hold you back. There’s a reason why we all carry mobile phones with us – because wireless is simply more convenient than wired.
The Advantages of Wireless Sensors
With wireless sensors it is easier to adapt to changing data center needs.
Need more visibility in an area of the data center? Quickly add new sensors.
Need to change technology in your data center? It’s easy with wireless sensors because they aren’t wired to an appliance or locked into PDU vendor.
Need to take a door off a rack? That’s easy because there are no wires!
Need to expand the type monitoring you do? That’s easy too because the right wireless sensor solution will support different sensor types with the one set of reader infrastructure. Run a mix of temperature, humidity, door open, air pressure differential, power monitoring, real time asset tracking sensors and more.
Wireless sensing solutions offer a game-changing alternative:
- Easy installation and configuration: Simply place wireless sensors exactly where they are needed, and they'll automatically connect to the monitoring system.
- Increased flexibility: Wireless sensors can be easily redeployed or reconfigured as needed, without the hassle of rewiring. Adding or repositioning a wireless sensor is much more convenient and can be done in a moment. Eliminate long lead times and work orders for wiring.
- Reduced maintenance overhead: With fewer cables to manage, maintenance is simplified, reducing downtime and improving overall reliability.
- Increased adaptability: With the right wireless sensor solution there is no lock-in to a vendor’s PDU or appliance or DCIM. As your data center needs and technologies change you are not forced to change your monitoring solution. Wireless sensors make it easier to adapt to change.
Choosing the Right Wireless Sensing Solution
Remember when I said not all wireless sensors are created equal? It’s true. Some wireless sensor solutions are limited by the number of sensors that can be supported by a single reader/gateway/wireless module. Some solutions are limited by read range. Some are limited by the number reads per second. Some have inflexible and antiquated integration approaches.
Here are some key consideration that can help you identify and avoid the limitations of some wireless solutions, which can help you save time and money.
- There are wireless solutions designed and proven to work inside data centers. The wireless sensors that work best in data centers don’t use WI-FI and they don’t use Bluetooth because WI-FI and Bluetooth performance and reliability suffers in noisy, metal and signal dense environments like data centers.
- Choose the solution that meets your security needs. Choose wireless sensors that can’t control or change anything. Choose the wireless sensors that simply monitor and report, and that only communicate with approved reader infrastructure.
- Choose the solution for scalability and expansion. Choose a solution that supports seamless expansion of your monitoring setup as needed. This includes convenience of adding new and relocating sensors, and for support of many different sensor types.
- Choose for flexible Integration with existing infrastructure. Select a system that integrates smoothly with your current monitoring, BMS, DCIM and ITSM systems. Choose a solution with a single point of integration that can simultaneously integrate with multiple systems using many protocols. Beware of wireless solutions that use gateways that require you to select protocols in advance, require many points of integration or require the gateway to be hardwired into an alternate communication network.
A Few Things to Take Away from This
Don’t be afraid of wireless sensors in your data center for environmental monitoring. The technology has been proven over decades of real-world use inside data centers around the world.
Wireless sensors are well suited for new and existing data centers alike and can support traditional Enterprise and Government data centers, as well as colocation, hyperscale and AI data centers.
The right solution can be very cost effective and can scale on-demand to meet growing needs.
Free yourself from wires!
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