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Sun Microsystems Inc. on Wednesday launched the Sun RFID Industry Solution for Physical Asset Tracking, a combination of products and services meant to simplify the process of designing and integrating a radio-frequency-identification system for tracking physical assets.
The application and business processes in the solution rely on RFID technology to determine the real-time location of critical assets and issue an alert when an asset being tracked is not in its assigned location. "We saw the need in our own facility to track assets," said Julie Sarbacker, director RFID business unit at Sun.
Sun has more than 1,500 labs worldwide to support its multibillion dollar research and development efforts. To reduce costs and increase efficiencies, it has begun to consolidate its labs and found that it needs a better method of tracking its equipment.
Bar codes, which are typically placed on the back of equipment, for example, where it's difficult to read, provides information about the asset, but not the location or the last person to use or move it. Jim Clarke, chief RFID architect at Sun, said companies most interested in this asset tracking system are hospitals to track IV pumps and beds, airports to keep track of travelers' luggage and equipment, and large companies that just want to track PCs and printers.
The Sun RFID Industry Solution for Physical Asset Tracking has already been deployed internally at two locations -- the Sun Shared Lab in Newark, Calif., and the Sun Tradeshow Equipment Distribution Center in Milpitas, Calif.
Within the Sun Newark Shared Lab Project, Sun plans to maintain 10,000+ servers and computing devices within a 6,000-square-foot facility. Within one hour, Sun can verify the location and physical characteristics from type, to age, to expiration date, to temperature for all assets at the facility without the need of a network connection. It takes much less time to take inventory, too. In fact, it takes a few seconds to read 50 server racks for those tagged with RFID vs. five to 20 minutes to read each a server rack with bar code tags.
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