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Do they pay attention to temperature with any granularity? "Cold aisle temperature" is not a single number; it varies. If it *doesn't* vary, they're either REALLY good (unlikely) or spending too much on cooling and charging you too much. Field Guide to Datacenter Temperature Monitoring: http://www.sensatronics.com/index.php/support/library/265.html 5% off from the Engineering department, use this code: ENG09 (expires Jan 1 2010)

This is clearly bad software design. The access card identifies you, and likely knows your weight within 10%.

Field Guide to Datacenter Temperature Monitoring:
http://www.sensatronics.com/index.php/support/library/265.html

We used the Sensatronics EM1 which is connected to the network and monitor it with several things. The EM1 interface is very simple and one of the monitors is just a cron job that scrapes the output from the web interface and will shutdown some of our more sensative equipment if it gets too hot.

They also have a bevy of interfaces from commercial products and the couple of monitoring/notification systems we tested were all able to communicate with the EM1 without any problems.

The total cost for the EM1 and several temp and temp+humidity probes was less than 700$ USD. If you don't care about multiple probes you could probably get it for under 500$ USD.

http://www.sensatronics.com/

I've used crash carts from a company called Ergotron: http://www.ergotron.com/tabid/158/language/en-US/d efault.aspx

At my current and my past company, they work real well. I looked high and low for a good crash cart and nothing seemed to come close to these. Maybe I was just searching the wrong terms(and apparently my vendors were too). They are a bit pricey though, ~$1500 or so to start. I have a Styleview LCD cart at my current job, and had a LCD cart and a laptop cart at my last place (servers were co-located in a ~900 sq foot cage, 8 feet between rows, so plenty of space for the carts).

I also bought a KVM over IP/CAT5 solution from raritan(http://www.raritan.com/), which worked out real well for those situations where a serial console wasn't enough(unless you have fancy out of band management, some do, some don't). I setup tables in the front of the cage, hooked up a couple of the raritan hardware clients. Typically ran one CAT5 cable w/KVM hookup to each rack, so it could be plugged into any system fairly easily. Range of 1000 feet. This was pretty pricey too, with the adapters and all it was about $25k. Though in the grand scheme of things it was cheap at the time. I had cyclades terminal servers in every rack, with serial consoles on all the servers and network gear.

Also I hooked up a temperature sensor board, from Sensatronics(http://www.sensatronics.com/) I think. I think it was a 16 port board, and I bought all 300 foot cables for all of the sensors, and cut them to length. This ended up being about $5k I think(I went way overkill on the cable lengths).

At my current company we use servertech(http://www.servertech.com/) PDUs, their higher end models come with optional temperature/humidity sensors so we use those instead of the senatronics.

Despite it being a co-location, we had 500kW of power going into that cage(standard setup was ~12kW/rack), if the data center had followed their own procedures(AT&T enterprise network services), we would of had to have about a 5,500 sq foot cage, comparable to your data center :) (@ 90 watts/sq foot of cooling). But they did not(at the time, they wised up July of last year and now strictly enforce their cooling capacity at this particular data center).

posting as AC, since I don't have an account. I read slashdot daily but I post maybe once every 2-3 years, so I haven't bothered to make an account.

There are many room temperature monitoring solutions out there, but the OP is on a budget. Easiest way to handle it is to NOT have the server auto-reboot on power restore. I wouldn't do that for the main web server (which should probably be at a colo anyway) but for a general office server, it would be fine. The OP could also have the server auto-shutdown when the INTERNAL temperature (such as CPU temp) gets too high (may want to do that anyway).

I'm a design engineer at a temperature monitoring company (not a sales guy, I asked 'em not to bug you) and could probably give you a suggestion or two for your wiring etc. (A sales guy saw your post and asked me "how Slashdot worked" so I told him I'd contact you.)

Of course, I think in terms of our devices - we have a 16-channel monitor that's rated for installation down to -40 C (-40 F) and isn't terribly expensive ($499, I think, but since I'm a tech guy I don't know for sure) plus $50 per probe. Max run on a probe is half a mile (2600' or so) over cat5 (or you can buy more expensive long probes.) If you use someone else's hardware, look for industrial-temperature rated hardware if the PCB is going to be inside the cooled area. Mechanical parts (e.g. hard drives) should be avoided at all costs.

If you have any more specific questions I'd be happy to answer, even if you don't use our hardware. Our stuff is all Ethernet interfaced, for an example look at:

For humans:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/

For computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/config/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/data/

XML for computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmlconfig/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmldata/

Perl scripts are available that grab data from the devices. Note that they don't log data (normally... there's an HTTP POST feature that does log up to 18 hours of data) but are designed to get the data into PC-land as quickly as possible. They run a tiny embedded OS, Linux is a bit heavyweight for cheap 256K flash hardware. (uCOS/2, not that it matters.)

--Drew Van Zandt
    Hardware Engineer
    Sensatronics LLC
    http://sensatronics.com/

I'm a design engineer at a temperature monitoring company (not a sales guy, I asked 'em not to bug you) and could probably give you a suggestion or two for your wiring etc. (A sales guy saw your post and asked me "how Slashdot worked" so I told him I'd contact you.)

Of course, I think in terms of our devices - we have a 16-channel monitor that's rated for installation down to -40 C (-40 F) and isn't terribly expensive ($499, I think, but since I'm a tech guy I don't know for sure) plus $50 per probe. Max run on a probe is half a mile (2600' or so) over cat5 (or you can buy more expensive long probes.) If you use someone else's hardware, look for industrial-temperature rated hardware if the PCB is going to be inside the cooled area. Mechanical parts (e.g. hard drives) should be avoided at all costs.

If you have any more specific questions I'd be happy to answer, even if you don't use our hardware. Our stuff is all Ethernet interfaced, for an example look at:

For humans:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/

For computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/config/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/data/

XML for computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmlconfig/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmldata/

Perl scripts are available that grab data from the devices. Note that they don't log data (normally... there's an HTTP POST feature that does log up to 18 hours of data) but are designed to get the data into PC-land as quickly as possible. They run a tiny embedded OS, Linux is a bit heavyweight for cheap 256K flash hardware. (uCOS/2, not that it matters.)

--Drew Van Zandt
    Hardware Engineer
    Sensatronics LLC
    http://sensatronics.com/

I'm a design engineer at a temperature monitoring company (not a sales guy, I asked 'em not to bug you) and could probably give you a suggestion or two for your wiring etc. (A sales guy saw your post and asked me "how Slashdot worked" so I told him I'd contact you.)

Of course, I think in terms of our devices - we have a 16-channel monitor that's rated for installation down to -40 C (-40 F) and isn't terribly expensive ($499, I think, but since I'm a tech guy I don't know for sure) plus $50 per probe. Max run on a probe is half a mile (2600' or so) over cat5 (or you can buy more expensive long probes.) If you use someone else's hardware, look for industrial-temperature rated hardware if the PCB is going to be inside the cooled area. Mechanical parts (e.g. hard drives) should be avoided at all costs.

If you have any more specific questions I'd be happy to answer, even if you don't use our hardware. Our stuff is all Ethernet interfaced, for an example look at:

For humans:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/

For computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/config/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/data/

XML for computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmlconfig/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmldata/

Perl scripts are available that grab data from the devices. Note that they don't log data (normally... there's an HTTP POST feature that does log up to 18 hours of data) but are designed to get the data into PC-land as quickly as possible. They run a tiny embedded OS, Linux is a bit heavyweight for cheap 256K flash hardware. (uCOS/2, not that it matters.)

--Drew Van Zandt
    Hardware Engineer
    Sensatronics LLC
    http://sensatronics.com/

I'm a design engineer at a temperature monitoring company (not a sales guy, I asked 'em not to bug you) and could probably give you a suggestion or two for your wiring etc. (A sales guy saw your post and asked me "how Slashdot worked" so I told him I'd contact you.)

Of course, I think in terms of our devices - we have a 16-channel monitor that's rated for installation down to -40 C (-40 F) and isn't terribly expensive ($499, I think, but since I'm a tech guy I don't know for sure) plus $50 per probe. Max run on a probe is half a mile (2600' or so) over cat5 (or you can buy more expensive long probes.) If you use someone else's hardware, look for industrial-temperature rated hardware if the PCB is going to be inside the cooled area. Mechanical parts (e.g. hard drives) should be avoided at all costs.

If you have any more specific questions I'd be happy to answer, even if you don't use our hardware. Our stuff is all Ethernet interfaced, for an example look at:

For humans:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/

For computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/config/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/data/

XML for computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmlconfig/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmldata/

Perl scripts are available that grab data from the devices. Note that they don't log data (normally... there's an HTTP POST feature that does log up to 18 hours of data) but are designed to get the data into PC-land as quickly as possible. They run a tiny embedded OS, Linux is a bit heavyweight for cheap 256K flash hardware. (uCOS/2, not that it matters.)

--Drew Van Zandt
    Hardware Engineer
    Sensatronics LLC
    http://sensatronics.com/

I'm a design engineer at a temperature monitoring company (not a sales guy, I asked 'em not to bug you) and could probably give you a suggestion or two for your wiring etc. (A sales guy saw your post and asked me "how Slashdot worked" so I told him I'd contact you.)

Of course, I think in terms of our devices - we have a 16-channel monitor that's rated for installation down to -40 C (-40 F) and isn't terribly expensive ($499, I think, but since I'm a tech guy I don't know for sure) plus $50 per probe. Max run on a probe is half a mile (2600' or so) over cat5 (or you can buy more expensive long probes.) If you use someone else's hardware, look for industrial-temperature rated hardware if the PCB is going to be inside the cooled area. Mechanical parts (e.g. hard drives) should be avoided at all costs.

If you have any more specific questions I'd be happy to answer, even if you don't use our hardware. Our stuff is all Ethernet interfaced, for an example look at:

For humans:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/

For computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/config/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/data/

XML for computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmlconfig/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmldata/

Perl scripts are available that grab data from the devices. Note that they don't log data (normally... there's an HTTP POST feature that does log up to 18 hours of data) but are designed to get the data into PC-land as quickly as possible. They run a tiny embedded OS, Linux is a bit heavyweight for cheap 256K flash hardware. (uCOS/2, not that it matters.)

--Drew Van Zandt
    Hardware Engineer
    Sensatronics LLC
    http://sensatronics.com/

I'm a design engineer at a temperature monitoring company (not a sales guy, I asked 'em not to bug you) and could probably give you a suggestion or two for your wiring etc. (A sales guy saw your post and asked me "how Slashdot worked" so I told him I'd contact you.)

Of course, I think in terms of our devices - we have a 16-channel monitor that's rated for installation down to -40 C (-40 F) and isn't terribly expensive ($499, I think, but since I'm a tech guy I don't know for sure) plus $50 per probe. Max run on a probe is half a mile (2600' or so) over cat5 (or you can buy more expensive long probes.) If you use someone else's hardware, look for industrial-temperature rated hardware if the PCB is going to be inside the cooled area. Mechanical parts (e.g. hard drives) should be avoided at all costs.

If you have any more specific questions I'd be happy to answer, even if you don't use our hardware. Our stuff is all Ethernet interfaced, for an example look at:

For humans:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/

For computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/config/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/data/

XML for computers:
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmlconfig/
http://em1.sensatronics.com/xmldata/

Perl scripts are available that grab data from the devices. Note that they don't log data (normally... there's an HTTP POST feature that does log up to 18 hours of data) but are designed to get the data into PC-land as quickly as possible. They run a tiny embedded OS, Linux is a bit heavyweight for cheap 256K flash hardware. (uCOS/2, not that it matters.)

--Drew Van Zandt
    Hardware Engineer
    Sensatronics LLC
    http://sensatronics.com/

Yep. We use a model E4 (http://www.sensatronics.com/products_temperaturem onitor.php) and it works really well. One of the admins here wrote a program so we could monitor it via MRTG, and also set boundaries so it'll page us if it goes out of bounds. Works very well, we've never even had to reboot the little thing. Not expensive, either.

My company (Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a sales guy) makes products designed jsut for this! Ethernet-based (or serial-port based) and work with MANY software options including Nagios, or we have a perl script for data collection that you could hack to send you email if you like do-it-yourself. Here's the device I recommend. There are some homebrew-ish solutions out there, but we sell to thousands of very happy customers, and provide everything from the basics to lots of bells and whistles. SMS messages are the most commonly used notification method, though a few prefer pagers. Hey, you can even contact one of the engineers directly for tech support. ;-)

Check http://www.sensatronics.com/ They sell very neat network-attached environmental sensors which are very easy to work with.

(Friend works for them)

Disclaimer: Yes, I work for a company that makes temperature, humidity, and leak sensing equipment for IT. Sensatronics

I think trying to convince server/CPU vendors to produce cooler products is futile... so long as the server room cooling is available, it makes sense to take advantage of it if it gets you more computing power per cubic foot/per U. If it were economically THAT much cheaper not to provide so much cooling, then hosting providers/rackspace sellers would probably offer reduced-price space for low-power servers. Does anyone know of a provider that gives discounts (or conversely charges fees on the other end) for low-heat colocation space? I haven't seen it.

On the disaster story side, I still remember watching the IT guys at a previous employer wander by the window to the server room periodically and check the thermometer in the window... now that I work for a company that sells cheap networked devices to do the checking automagically (and alarms on overtemp) I wonder how any IT department can justify something like that... it seems potentially disastrous, yet it was a large company I worked for, with (theoretically) experienced IT guys. Does anyone else see silliness like this where they work?

http://www.sensatronics.com/TempTrax/
http://www.netbotz.com/products/wall.html

If you want to roll your own: http://quozl.netrek.org/ts/

I bought the kit for the one on the second link and it works great.