Modius Data Center Blog

Uncovering the True State of Your Data Center with Standard Edition

Posted by Marina Thiry on Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 07:24 PM

How to achieve better visibility and control over your data center operations—without the risk.

Veterans of data center operations tell us that having visibility and gaining better control over the critical infrastructure and IT assets throughout their entire facility is the key to maximizing data center efficiency. 

Achieving this requisite visibility is not a trivial task. It involves overcoming the interoperability hurdles of monitoring all of the various critical systems—such as generators, chillers, water pumps, air exchangers, PDUs, power strips, on-board server instrumentation, and more.

Data Center Monitoring Alarming Standard EditionOn top of that, making sense of the various alarm schemas—which are so vital to maintaining control of data center performance and achieving a higher level of efficiency—can be more of a headache than the alarm system is worth.  They typically don’t factor input from the full gamut of facility and IT equipment into their respective alarm thresholds. Consequently, spurious alerts from the disparate alarm systems trip over themselves and conceal the true state of the data center.

If your work is impeded by spurious alarms…or if you find yourself ignoring low-level alarms because they’re out of context from your overarching data center priorities…or if you cringe at the thought of the time and cost involved in deploying a monitoring and alarm management solution across your entire data center, then Modius can help.

data center alarms monitoring management standard editionModius offers OpenData Standard Edition, a low-cost unified alarm management and notification solution for monitoring all power and cooling equipment, including IT racks. At only $1,995 per user per year, it is the only solution in the industry offered at a very low cost and distributed as a downloadable, easy-to-install software package. This low-cost offering reduces the risk of “locking in” to a solution without having it thoroughly tested in your environment, on your own terms.

OpenData interoperates with most network equipment through its support of the essential communications protocols, including SNMP, Modbus and BACnet. It collects and stores performance data, normalizes it, then transforms the data into a simplified, federated view. This means you don’t have to kludge together various point solutions, or contend with different data formats or increments that add complexity to data center management.

And, because of OpenData’s intelligent monitoring capabilities, customers also benefit from a sensible, unified approach to alarm management. The OpenData software matches all monitored performance against configurable thresholds and sends out alarms via a centralized notification engine. Rather than send an overflow of low-level alerts, it only sends the alarms you need when they matter most. This means you can manage your data center as a complete system—instead of disparate components—and get insight to the true state of your data center.

Sign up for a free demo of OpenData Standard Edition today and uncover the true state of your data center in a matter of hours.

Topics: data center monitoring, data center availability, data center alarming, modbus, data center infrastructure, Operational-Intelligence, Making-Data-Relevant

An Unforeseeable Leak Finds Its Way to Sybase’s Data Center

Posted by Jay Hartley on Wed, Sep 09, 2009 @ 07:00 AM

As a follow-up to our inaugural blog post regarding our implementation of continuous PUE monitoring at Sybase,  I wanted to share a real-world challenge Sybase recently encountered. Although Sybase is acknowledged as one of the country’s most efficient, reliable data centers, it is not without its unexpected challenges.

This spring, Sybase narrowly avoided a significant outage due to an unforeseen water leak from outside the walls of its data center. On each floor, directly above its high-availability Secure Data Center facility, are several kitchenettes (for the offices on that particular floor). On a recent weekend, a water hose popped in one of the kitchenettes connecting the sink to a cooler. Water gushed out and quickly flooded the kitchen. Worse, it eventually found its way down two stories between the walls to the data center facility below.


Sybase did not learn about the problem until one its PDUs was shut down by the leak. Luckily, its PDU redundancy avoided any outage. However, this unforeseeable leak resulted in a damaged PDU and a few downed servers.

To avoid an event such as this happening in the future, Sybase turned to Modius. Modius identified a cost-effective leak detection system to be installed in each of the kitchenettes in the building. We configured these residential-scale leak controller systems on the Modius Device Gateway and added it to the notification schema, demonstrating the versatility of our OpenData® system to capture data from practically any device used inside or outside a data center.

By utilizing one of the existing Modius I/O modules, we were able to configure and test the entire system in about 2.5 hours, providing Sybase a quick, cost-effective means to avoid an event such as this in the future.

Kind regards,
Jay H. Hartley, PhD
Director of Professional ServicesJay.Hartley[at]Modius.com

Topics: data center monitoring, data center availability, data center alarming

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