[PeterC]

We are moving our offices including our main data centre and I would like to make sure that we improve our environmental monitoring. I was hoping to run a few questions by everyone:

- The Data center is fairly small (approx 500sqft). We will have two rows of 3 racks facing a single cold isle. As for monitoring I was going to place temp sensors in the front of each rack about 1/3 the way down. Does that placement sound correct? What is best practice?
(The UPS and comm racks in the room will also have temp sensors)

- We will have humidity control on our HVAC setup however I was only going to put one humidity sensor in the data centre. I don't think that it will vary as much as temperature and wanted to save by avoiding extra humidity sensors. Is this a mistake? Should I have more than one Humidity sensor?

-Comm rooms on other floors in the building will have exhaust fans but no dedicated AC. I was planning to only monitor temp and water. Humidity seems a waste of time if I can't control it. Does everyone agree?

-The DataAire control units/alarm processors for the HVAC that are spec'd do not have modbus or multiple alarm outputs. I will have two or three dry contacts that will deliver generic HVAC alarm from the various units. We can see the alarm detail from the alarm processor in the data center. In reality we would call in service anyway so I don't see an issue with not having detail on the monitoring call out other than there is a problem with HVAC. Thoughts? Does everyone have detail on the alerts / call outs?

- Are there anything else I should consider? I will have smoke, water snake, door contact, sound, video. I am not sure If I should have an alarm from the Fire suppression system as it will be tied into UPS and the building systems so if it goes off I can't really do anything anyway.

Monitoring system = Sensaphone IMS 4000 - analog phone line for dialout, email alerts, and might tie it to Orion but that seems redundant.

Any feed back would be greatly appreciated.