Supercharge your DCiM strategy with DC Insight solutions

We have provided our last training session to a customer today and the customer's Data Center Operations Manager was very thankful for our DC Insight solution. This solution exceeded their expectation and it provided unprecedented visibility and insight into their data center. They have deployed 300+ sensors to cover 4 sites in Hong Kong, and the DC Insight software provide a straight-forward user interface for their operators.

Transforming customer Organization from Reactive to Proactive 

Our solution completely transformed the way they operate, from an reactive organization to an proactive one. Before the deployment of the DC Insight platform, they are plagued with incident where it was the end-user who are the first to know their service was down!

Today, the DC Insight's centralize and easy to customize thresholds settings allow them to iterate and fine tune their notification mechanism such that every alert they receive are important alert. Our data logging and strip charts allow any authorized operator to quickly look back at historical data to analyze the situation. With the readily-accessible data, they can take a data-centric approach to support their investigation. In this particular case, the customer share with us how they were able to quickly look back at the pass performance of the cooling unit (look at the supply and return air trends) and push for a thorough investigation of the unit by their supplier, where it was eventually found their were hidden problems with the unit.

Integrating DC Insight with Customer existing Infrastructure

We understand customers don't want silo systems and we take great pride in the interoperability of our solution and the integration services we provide. For this particular customer, we integrated DC Insight into their existing incident management solution, Microsoft System Center Service Manager and connect to their Micosoft System Center Operation Manager system.

This integration was very important for our customer to simplify the adoption by their operational team and it was really rewarding to learn that not owner are the project sponsors happy with the result, the operation users also found the new tools very helpful in managing their data center day-to-day activities.

Wraps up an exciting 2012 Q1 and DC Insight in other industries?

Last quarter of 2011 and Q1 of 2012 was an exiting 6 months for us. In this 6 months, we have wrapped up a major roll out of our DC Insight solution for an electricity provider in Hong Kong covering 4 our their data centers in Hong Kong with hundreds of sensors deployed.

We also kick started demo and proof-of-concept projects for many various companies. This includes:

• A University in Hong Kong
• A French Bank
• An American Bank
• A TV Broadcasting company
• A Cosmetic manufacturer
• A Casino in Macau
• A Logistic company
• A Government Agency

We are also seeing an interesting development of our solution branching out to other verticals outside of data center. For example, the cosmetic manufacturer is looking to achieve ISO standards for their existing manufacturing processing. Their site contains multiple clean rooms where their manufacturing equipment are located.

Historically, they monitoring their temperature and humidity through standalone devices and requires a laborious process to physically log down the readings of each device in each clean room.

With our wire-free approach, this customer can just installed one reader to cover their manufacturing site, which is around 2,000 - 3,000 sq ft, and place sensors anywhere they see fit or required by the ISO auditor - all without interrupting their manufacturing operation.

Another partner from the commercial refrigerator business approached as and is interested in our solution to provide centralize monitoring for commercial refrigerators for large restaurants and hotels. It is interesting to learn that large restaurants often have an area with multiple commercial refrigerators installed. An these areas are usually around 2,000 - 3,000 sq ft, making traditional wiring solution costly and difficult to deploy, but in our case, a single reader can nicely cover the whole area.

Our partner also shared an interesting angle on the correlation of food poisoning, even at high-end expensive restaurant, and the lack of proper monitoring. To this day, all these commercial refrigerators have standalone monitoring but lack a centralize approach with alerting. What this means is again, a laborious process of having staff manually take note of temperature and humidity every couple of hours. No wonder at this day and age, food poisoning in the food and services industry is still a norm.

As we further develop our solution, it will be interesting to explore what other industries it can be applied on. While our traditional complete on-premise approach may not be applicable or cost-effective, technologically speaking, it is not difficult for us to offer a hosted service, where only the end-point monitoring devices are on-site, and the software runs in the "cloud". It will be interesting to explore setting up this cloud-based service, but this will be a topic for another post.

DC Insight integration with Liebert Precision Cooling Unit with IntelliSlot Web Card

We are further expanding our portfolio of devices pre-integrated into the DC Insight Platform. The latest addition allow us to monitoring Liebert Precision Cooling Unit equipped with IntelliSlot Web Card. With this integration, we could easily monitor the control, supply and return air condition of the cooling unit.

Learn more about how our DC Insight monitoring solution allows our customer to easily retrofit their live data center with high density environment and power monitoring without any downtime! 

Monitoring Riello UPS with DC Insight solution

Working with our partners, we are able to proof Riello UPS integrates nicely with our DC Insight solution. Make sure the NetMan communication module is installed in your Riello UPS. In our test, we had a NetMan 102 Plus.

Our solution comes with a standard UPS probe. Most modern SNMP-enabled UPS follows the RFC1628 standard, and you will be able to read the common UPS values from your device.

The standard UPS probe is under "Network Devices > UPS > Standard UPS (RFC 1628)"

Next coming up, we will integrate with Liebert PEX CRAC and TTK water leakage detection system

DC Insight with IP Camera integration

Integrating IP-based security cameras into DC Insight solution is a very easy!

Simply drop a camera icon onto the map.

Associate the double click action of the icon with the IP camera's URL.

And you are done. Any operator can now double click the camera icon to bring up the video feed of the IP camera.

Remote monitoring is made easy with DC Insight. With our wide-range of easy to deploy wire-free sensors, operators can easily set threshold and alert on a wide-range of sensory information. Integrated with IP cameras, operators can view live what is happening at the site. With 2-way audio support IP camera devices, operators can easily communicate with people on-site as soon as sensor alarms are triggered.

Issues are best addressed when they happen. With integration of sensor alarms and visual camera, operators can quickly look into environment issues while they are happening.

QDS at Data Center Strategics Conference 2011

QDS wraps up a successful showcase of the latest data center solutions at the Data Center Strategics Conference 2011.  QDS was a gold sponsor at the Data Center Strategics Conference 2011, and in this event we exhibit some of the best solutions available to data center operators today.

• AirBlock Sliding Door Containment Systems
• Avocent DSView 3 Remote Access Solution
• DC Insight Data Center Monitoring
• Wire-Free, High Density Environment Monitoring
• High Density Branch Circuit Power Monitoring

Here are some photo highlights of the event.

7 days before Data Center Strategics in Hong Kong

We are entering the last stretch in preparing for the Data Center Strategics 2011 in Hong Kong. QDS is a Gold Sponsor at the event and we have a lot prepared this year.

Over the years working with data center operators, products and solutions from vendors, we are proud to present the "best-of-breed" for the event.

Trying to present all these solutions in an area of 2x3 meters is quite a challenging task. Unfortunately we had to make some sacrifices. Nonetheless, you can always check out QDS website, or more specifically our solution section.

Our sales and marketing team had a quick huddle, and this is the layout we have arrived with:

Can you decipher the doodling above?

In this booth, we will showcase:

• Avocent's Remote Access Solution
• DC Insight Environment and Power Monitoring solution
• AirBlock Containment Solution

Remember to visit our booth when you arrived at the event. 

We have a very limited amount of complimentary tickets available for the event. If you work in the data center industry, sign-up to our newsletter for a chance to win a complimentary ticket to DCS 2011 Hong Kong.

See you at DCS 2011.