Recently, a leading provider of network infrastructure adopted RF Code’s solution to solve unique problems related to its IT lab and testing environments. The dynamic nature of the IT lab assets made for some unique challenges regarding inventory and accountability: assets are used in different test beds for customer deployment scenarios. They’re always moving around, which means they’re hard to track, secure, and account for.
To further complicate matters, some of these IT hardware assets are as small as a laptop or line cards that fit into a chassis, making them very difficult to locate. Because there is so little available space on these assets, even a traditional bar code is out of the question. Lastly, due to the ad hoc, changing nature of the lab space, there were significant challenges in maintaining the environmental integrity of the labs, especially around temperature and humidity. Passive RFID technology wasn’t going to solve the tracking problem, nor could it help the company maintain proper lab conditions conducive to keeping assets up and running.
In investigating other technologies, the customer found that Passive RFID tags are too easy to “defeat.” Their limited read range and capabilities means they can not accurately track assets throughout their movement within the IT labs. Moreover, they cannot protect the asset tag from being tampered with. If someone tries to remove the tag, they do not receive a tamper notification.
The company turned to RF Code’s real time asset tracking and wire-free environmental monitoring solutions to solve these issues. Lab assets were tagged with RF Code’s tamper-proof active tags to track their movement and location throughout the lab in real time. Now, the customer instantly receives notifications of asset movement throughout the lab, and receives an alert if the tag is removed from the asset. Most importantly, the company has an accurate, real-time inventory of all its IT equipment without going through the manual process of counting assets or scanning bar codes or passive tags.
Real time visibility into its asset inventory means having a more accurate inventory, which allows the customer to depreciate the assets over a greater amount of time. Lastly, RF Code’s wire-free temperature and humidity sensor tags give the customer the ability to use the same RF Code infrastructure to monitor lab temperature and humidity. This protects the assets from harmful spikes in temperature and humidity, extending the life and utilization of the asset. Because the RF Code sensors are “wire-free,” they don’t involve the costly, specialized labor to install that traditional solutions require.
For this network infrastructure provider, RF Code’s real-time accurate inventory and wire-free environmental monitoring solutions have provided an immediate ROI and financial justification for the RF Code solution.
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