The Test Center highlights noteworthy PC components that came through the lab so far this year. Manufacturers' ability to build components that support both quad- and dual-core hardware platforms continues to impress us.
Acer's latest Aspire Gemstone laptops come just in time for the holiday shopping blitz, targeting consumers with a range of entertainment-focused models.
It's been a busy quarter for shakeups in some of the industry's top channel companies. Here we look at several channel executives who have come and gone in the last few months.
Review: It's So Easy Being Green
12:00 AM EST Mon. Dec. 17, 2007
From the December 17, 2007 issue of CRN Tech
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Solution providers now have a choice for the data center: They can offer energy-efficient displays, computers that use chips that can do more and generate less heat, and cooling systems that require little power. It's one thing to get equipment into the data center, but it's also important to monitor energy usage and accurately measure heat output to verify all those green products are doing the job. For just such a product, CRN Test Center engineers looked at a monitoring and alerting solution from Avtech Software. Room Alert 24E measures a slew of environmental factors in the data center, including temperature, humidity and power, and sends alerts when a particular threshold is exceeded.
For solution providers working with customers concerned about the costs of running a data center—powering the equipment, cooling the center, protecting sensitive machines—a monitoring solution like this can help figure out expenses and identify problem spots.
Along with rises and drops in temperature and humidity, Room Alert can detect smoke and fire, interruptions in main power and UPS power, floods and water leaks, entry and motion, air flow based on fan status and dry contacts.
Engineers set up the Room Alert in a test area with six servers of varying power, several switches and two NAS boxes. The Room Alert equipment included five temperature sensors, a digital power sensor and a room entry sensor. The device has built-in sensors for digital temperature, digital humidity and main power.
Room Alert 24E is both a hardware and software solution. It consists of an ID box, sensors and probes to collect data, and the PageR Enterprise software. The application offers a central console with a Web interface that collects, filters and displays important status and event information from every server and TCP/IP device on the network. Events—both normal status and critical warnings—are flagged to automatically trigger notifications to remote personnel, run scripts and launch applications. Solution providers can use the interface to configure the device, analyze the information from the sensors and send alerts or perform corrective action depending on the business rules.
The device monitors the environment in realtime and sends alert notifications via e-mail and SMS to computers, phones, pagers and handhelds. The alerts can be tweaked to consider thresholds for rising and falling temperatures and humidity, as well as fluctuations in power consumption. The device can also use Simple Network Paging Protocol, dialout paging (TAP or UCP), Web page update, logfile update, pop-up broadcast messages, instant messaging, an audible alarm, spoken alarm and fax.
All of the collected data from sensors is accessible in the Web interface. The product is also SNMP-enabled, so any SNMP-capable application, such as PageR Enterprise, Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli, and CA's Unicenter, can be used to monitor the system.
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