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Arch Rock, a San Francisco-based provider of facility power and cooling infrastructure monitoring solutions announced its new wireless IP-based monitoring system for data centers on Monday.
The company’s Energy Optimizer is a customizable full-package solution that includes wireless sensors for electrical, thermal, flow and air-pressure conditions in the data center, as well as an interface that compiles the collected data and provides graphical representation of the facility’s conditions.
The interface is capable of representing data in terms of dollars spent on electricity the facility consumes, as well as its carbon footprint, according to Arch Rock CEO Roland Acra. The system measures the data center’s PUE, or its DCiE, and is capable of benchmarking its environmental conditions against temperature, humidity and air quality standards established by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.
This is the first solution four-year-old Arch Rock designed specifically for data centers, its first product having been purposed for commercial buildings at large.
Wireless sensors can be deployed on power circuits, equipment racks, CRAC and CRAH units, chillers and beneath raised floors. The number of sensors deployed varies, depending on the level of measurement granularity a client desires. Arch Rock also offers an external sensor that can help managers identify the amount of free cooling they can take advantage of in their particular location.
The system’s components include five types of sensor nodes, the interface application and the IP router. The interface can be purchased either as a physical appliance that can be installed in a rack or as a Web-based application, paid for on a yearly-subscription basis.
The subscription costs $3,000 per year for the first 30 sensors – a rate that decreases marginally as more sensors are deployed. Cost of the physical appliance is about $10,000.
Arch Rock began deploying various beta versions of the system in late Spring. More than 12 clients have deployed it in their data centers since, Acra said, including a large Bay Area university that wished to remain unnamed. Another existing client is a large semiconductor company that deployed Energy Optimizer in a 1 MW data center with 6,000 square feet of raised floor.
Arch Rock, established in 2005, is funded by NEA, Intel Capital and Shasta Ventures. It received $5 million in the first round of financing in 2005 and $10 million in the second round, which came two years later.
In September, IT industry analyst firm Gartner released results of a survey that concluded that monitoring of data center energy use will “remain immature through 2011,” with a majority of respondents reporting that at this point they are focusing resources on “consolidation, rationalization and virtualization,” rather than energy management tools.
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Keywords: Arch Rock, data center monitoring, wireless temperature sensors, wireless humidity sensors, PUE, energy efficiency, data center energy use, wireless data center monitoring | | 
