White Paper: Best Practices for Wire-free Environmental Monitoring in the Data Center

Monitoring for environmental threats in the data center is not a new concept. Since the beginning of modern data centers, the temperature of servers and network equipment has been a constant concern as one of the most threatening environmental conditions. The idea that servers need to be “protected” from environmental threats and operated only under the right conditions coincided with the explosion of client-server computing. Together, both were the driving factors behind the creation of the modern data center in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

Since then, the physical construction, physical layout, and implementation of a data center has steadily improved, optimized to accommodate the ever-changing requirements driven by advances in server and storage technology. The methods and mechanisms to monitor for physical threats in the data center have also evolved. In this paper, we will explore wire-free environmental monitoring best practices, one of the newest developments in data center physical threat monitoring.