• Temperature (i.e. air conditioning problems, power failure)
• Humidity (i.e. air conditioning problems, power failure)
• Main Power (i.e. power failure, UPS start)
• UPS Power (i.e. power failure, UPS start)
• Flooding (i.e. cold water supply to air conditioner leaking)
• Smoke (i.e. electronic component burning, fire)
• Intruder (i.e. door opening or room entry)
• Panic (i.e. user presses the 'panic button' for help)
  
  

• Unpredictable and potentially catastrophic results start to occur, like disk failures and CPU errors, which can cause extreme software and backup failures that can be difficult to recover from.
  
• System, application, or network access can become reduced, delayed or simply unavailable should systems or network components fail or stop working.
  
• Web sites can disappear when a server goes offline, making it appear to the world that your organization is out of business, or cause delays in service to your customers which can cause problems and a loss of future business.
  
• Manufacturers of equipment and the maintenance/software support organizations will often not accept responsibility for problems caused by equipment that has been exposed to extreme levels of temperature, humidity, flood, power, and other various environmental conditions.
  

The most common type of environmental problem encountered in the computer room is air conditioning failure. This can lead to high temperatures, high or low humidity, and water flooding (if the water inlet pipe leaks, which is fairly common). According to various market studies and the experience of many AVTECH Software customers, the most common causes of environmental problems in the computer room are:

1. Air Conditioning Failure
   
2. Power Supply Failure
   

A simple in-house experiment that you can implement yourself is to switch off the air conditioning in the computer room and observe what happens to the temperature in just a short time. When the temperature unexpectedly rises outside of a reasonable range, you or your staff will need to be alerted in a hurry.

The first consideration of any server or network monitoring system should be the computer room environment. This is because virtually the entire organization can immediately be effected when computer systems fail to act properly or become unreliable. Costs can mount quickly and easily become staggering for organizations that fail to respond immediately and properly. Think about the people and functions within your organization that would be effected if your primary computer systems go down for just 15-30 minutes.

One study by Professional Press Technical Publishing shows 75% of respondents being down at least half a day as a result of environment problems 1-3 times a year, costing from $10,000 to $50,000 per incident for 43% of these organizations.

When an environmental problem occurs, Room Alert immediately senses the problem and delivers an alarm signal to the appropriate staff member's mobile phone, pager, PDA or email. This is accomplished via the alerting and automatic action capabilities within the accompanying PageR Enterprise monitoring and alerting software (included). Additionally, many third party monitoring packages can be configured to receive the Room Alert alarm signals via SNMP trap or logfile monitoring and complete the alerting process. However, PageR Enterprise can take automatic action to shut down servers, initiate backups, turn on a backup air conditioner or whatever may be required.

So, if you understand the benefits and value of 'Preventive Monitoring' instead of just having a 'Recovery Plan', then you'll see how important it is to monitor your computer room environment BEFORE a catastrophe occurs. Don't allow some environmental issue to put your organization out of business for even one hour, learn more about Room Alert today. You'll find that you sleep better at night with Room Alert on duty and that those nightmares about catastrophic computer room failures will be a thing of the past. Call Bomara Associates now at 978.452.2299, we want to speak with you.