Copper and fibre cable maker Nexans has launched a product that helps offset the footprint created by its manufacturing operations.

The provider of advanced copper and optical fibre cables has extended its range and launched a series of environmental monitoring and access control (EMAC) devices. These can manage power consumption and cooling services intelligently, helping create a more energy efficient data center.

The EMAC devices add a critical newer, greener dimension to Nexans' portfolio of infrastructure cabling solutions, it claimed. EMAC will supplement the Lanmark and Lansense product ranges, which cover systems management, physical layer management and security services. Nexans claimed it now offers complete data centre network management range.

As their operations mushroom out of proportion - particularly on storage capacity and physical size - managers are feeling the heat, argued Nexans. The temperature is being raised by rising power consumption and inadequate cooling, which has made the EMAC's job increasingly critical to infrastructure management.

Intelligent management information and control is essential argued Rob Cardigan, Nexans' product development manager, and the EMAC meets that need. EMAC effectively supplements the existing physical layer management (Lanmark) and systems management (Lansense) solutions by providing an intelligent focus on powerand cooling within the network and its physical environment.

It works with either new or existing infrastructure, promised Nexan. It can be configured either for power monitoring only, or for a combination of power monitoring and individual outlet control.

Users can define their own upper and lower heat thresholds to provide different warning alarms or alerts, so when a defined critical status is exceeded the need for emergency intervention can be warned of.

The development of EMAC was the logical next step for Nexans, said Cardigan, and this has been a work in progress for some time. "Data centers do not function in isolation. They are huge systems, often larger than entire small towns," he said, "consuming similar amounts of energy and generating significant levels of heat. These new measurement and warning systems will fill an important gap for data centre owners and operators who simply do not have the time to perform physical checks on their power and cooling infrastructure on a day to day basis."