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Basingstoke, March 18 2009. Nexans, the worldwide leader in advanced copper and optical fibre cable solutions, has launched a new series of environmental monitoring and access control (EMAC) devices that provide intelligent management of power consumption and cooling services to help create more energy efficient ‘greener’ data centres.
The EMAC devices add a critical new dimension to Nexans’ already comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure cabling solutions. They supplement the well established LANmark and LANsense product ranges for systems management, physical layer management and security services to create complete data centre network management solutions.
As data centres grow in both capacity and physical size, they produce excessive heat through increased power consumption and inadequate cooling. This is becoming a critical aspect of infrastructure management that must be addressed, especially in view of the growing awareness of green issues and the impact of an organisation’s corporate carbon footprint, as well as the escalating costs of energy. So reliable, intelligent management information and control are essential requirements to enable data centre owners and operators to manange their infrastructure and power consumption more efficiently and cost effectively.
The new environmental monitoring and access control (EMAC) devices are designed to fill this gap. As the latest development in Nexan’s range of Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) products, EMAC effectively supplements the existing physical layer management (LANmark) and systems management (LANsense) solutions by providing an intelligent focus on power and cooling within the network and its physical environment. These intelligent capabilities can be applied to new or existing infrastructure and can be configured either for power monitoring only, or to offer a combination of power monitoring linked to individual outlet control.
Users can define their own upper and lower heat thresholds to provide different warning alarms or alerts, such as when a defined critical status requires emergency intervention, and to trigger appropriate escalation paths.
EMAC harnesses all configuration information across data centre equipment for intelligent monitoring. From the aggregated data it processes alarms in real time and suggests what action to take, schedules polling and captures detailed data to produce highly sophisticated, yet user-friendly graphical management information reports. These enable users to perform trend analysis and risk management for mission critical services. The analysis can be broken down by network, device or client using information that can be gathered either locally or remotely via secure authenticated IP access. The trend analysis also provides useful management information to enable informed decisions on capacity planning, risk analysis, performance benchmarking and for policing service level agreements.
Monitoring, measuring and reporting of power usage is available individually for multiple clients and billing streams can be generated for hosted clients.
The system also offers additional security measures to prevent the unauthorised use of power outlets or deployment of equipment. At the same time it assists system load management through phase balancing, capacity planning and so on. Locked servers can be recovered via remote IP power cycling. The system is easily expanded to monitor temperature, humidity, water or to control access to data centre cabinets through the use of solenoid locks and key pads.
Rob Cardigan, Nexans’ Senior LANsense Product Development Manager said: “The development of EMAC was the logical next step for us and we have been refining it for some time now. Data centres do not function in isolation. They are huge systems, often larger than entire small towns; consuming similar amounts of energy and generating significant levels of heat. These new measurement and warning systems will fill an important gap for data centre owners and operators who simply do not have the time to perform physical checks on their power and cooling infrastructure on a day to day basis.”
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