Our IoT Solutions automated the environmental controls of this global consulting organization's data centers

THE CHALLENGE:

Our customer is a leading global professional services company that manages data centers housing expensive equipment that run 24×7, mostly unmanned.

While top-of the-range solutions are deployed to secure this equipment from network and software threats, there was little visibility to environmental threats, such as heat, humidity and smoke.

While these factors were recorded manually, there was no alarm mechanism in place that satisfactorily monitored for all anomalies. This made maintaining precision air-conditioning of the data center rooms difficult and unpredictable.

Furthermore, there was no way within the system to represent environmental trends in the absence of an automated process, the result being that physical maintenance was carried out only on a reactive basis.

 

By the elimination of manual checks and reporting, the customer has improved monitoring across its infrastructure.

 

THE SOLUTION:

Tata Communications offered an IoT solution based on a low power wide area network (LPWAN). The solution comprised of three main elements:

1. Hardware Devices – Battery operated end devices were fixed into the data centers and customer premises to monitor temperature and humidity based on a defined period.

2. Network – A dedicated IoT public network powered by LoRa technology was deployed by Tata Communications.

3. Application – A bespoke application was created to meet the business needs of provisioning, maintaining and providing individual device data information that would improve business visibility across environmental factors and performance of the data centers. The application also includes data visualization and reports.

 

THE RESULT:

The benefits of adding this range of IoT solutions to the data centers has been many-fold. The customer now has a single real-time dashboard view of its data center temperature, as well as trends across the main cities in India. The customer can now accurately assure its own customers that the environmental parameters of servers are within accepted values.

By the elimination of manual checks and reporting, the customer has improved monitoring across its infrastructure, event based alerts mean corrective actions can be taken immediately, instead of waiting for manual reports.

Energy savings have been facilitated by monitoring temperature within narrowed tunnel, while the diminished need for people to record temperature inside data centers has also seen resources being optimized, so making the solution cost-effective.