Raritan launched its intelligent asset management tag and sensor solution saying it improves data center asset management by providing accurate, real-time information on all IT assets and their locations.

The firm said in larger data centers up to 25 percent of IT assets can go missing because of difficulty tracking IT assets. This translates into underutilized rack space and capacity, contributes to ghost servers, as well as wasted time locating equipment.

Raritan's intelligent Asset Management Tag (AMT), the size of a small mailing label, adheres to a server and connects to an Asset Management Sensor (AMS) attached to a rack rail. It tells operators the unique ID of the server and exactly where that server is located in the data center, down to the 1U level in a rack. The solution also indicates any moves or changes.

If the server is moved to a new location in the same rack or to a different rack, its new location is automatically recognized when the tag is connected to the sensor at the new location.

It provides visual guidance to help with equipment adds, moves, changes, reconfigurations or repairs. The sensor has RGB LED lights at each one rack unit (1U) to indicate what action should be taken. For example, a green light might indicate the available location for a server installation. This location could have been chosen by asset management software, such as Raritan's dcTrack DCIM -- which takes into account not only open space in a rack, but also sufficient electrical power, cooling and network connections. 

An installer can quickly find the correct space by looking for color-coded indication lights among rows of racks. Different colors can be used for other change-management processes. For example, a red blinking LED could be used to indicate a server maintenance request.

Director of Raritan's Energy Management Business Herman Chan said: "Even modest-size data centers have an enormous number of IT assets, from servers to storage to networking equipment, that need to be tracked. Often this is done ad hoc, using Excel spreadsheets and Visio diagrams, and becomes very labor intensive. There are some software programs available that are designed for the purpose of tracking IT equipment. However, if just a few moves, adds or changes are not recorded it can make the asset tracking system inaccurate and not useful. It quickly becomes challenging to know which assets exist in the data center and where they are located. Efficient data center management begins with smarter racks. Our new intelligent Asset Management Tag and Sensor solution automatically detects asset moves, adds, and changes, which improves accuracy and minimizes the hours needed to track IT assets or conduct audits."