Design of Environmental Monitoring system for Auxiliary Data Center using Lower Hardware Cost

Abstract

A large fraction of the consumed energy is spent on data center cooling, which has motivated a large amount of work on temperature management in data centers. Thus, environmental downtime is a significant cost to organizations and makes them unable to do business because what happens in the data center affects everyone. Installation of physical Information Technology and facilities related to environment on monitoring temperature, humidity, power, flood, smoke, air flow, and room entry is the most proactive way to reduce the unnecessary costs of expensive hardware replacement or unplanned downtime. For this reason, it is recommendable to implement an environmental monitoring system to monitor the temperature in data center with the option of sending an alert to the supervisors wherever they are. In this paper, we present environmental monitoring system for auxiliary data center implemented using opensource hardware platforms; Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and the Gobetwino. Wherein, Gobetwino transfers sensor data to the nearest host server in the same datacenter such as temperature and distance every time an object hits some object around the datacenter or a person comes in to the entrance. The objective of collecting temperature and humidity data allows monitoring server’s health and gets alerts if things start to go wrong. When the temperature hits 50oC, the supervisors at remote headquarters would get a SMS, and then they would take appropriate actions that make sense to reduce electrical costs and preserve functionality of servers in auxiliary data centers.