Emerson's New Mobile App Delivers Easy Management for the Small Data Center

The term “data center” likely brings to mind rows of servers and a cacophony of blinking lights on dark gray boxes throughout a cavernous but scrupulously clean room. However, for fairly large numbers of operations like hospitals and some offices, the “data center” is basically just one server in a closet somewhere, and it's doing the job just fine for that operation. Thus the tools required to manage that room full of servers would be overkill for the tiny data center, and Emerson recently brought out a new app to help manage these smaller spaces.

With the new app—known as iCOM CMS—Emerson offers a way to monitor alarms, as well as environmental factors like humidity and

temperature. Those who have Liebert units in place to manage cooling, meanwhile, can also get access to a slate of monitoring functions that those have on board. Cooling is often one of the issues most overlooked, with cooling capacity for such data centers seldom designed with future needs in mind. 

Better yet, for security purposes, those outside of the organization's current firewall only get access to one-way communication. The system sends information out, but there's no way to contact back through the app and through the information sent out. The user must get back inside the firewall in order to make changes, and once back inside, users get access to tools like changing certain set points, or changing alarm notifications.

Don't think this stops where it is, either; there are several features coming in the future that will prove even more helpful. Analytics systems are set to step in, taking advantage of stored data gathered to provide information about long-term trends to help decision making. Additionally, a planned integration with the larger Data Center Infrastructure Management suite of tools, known as Trellis, is set to take place in the near-term as well.

Using iCOM CMS represents a great step forward for the small data center user. While there are plenty of small data centers out there already, iCOM CMS represents a way to control these in much the same way a larger data center can be controlled, but without the massive added expense that such a data center can represent. That's great news for those firms for which a large data center would just be large-scale overkill, and allows these firms access to the appropriate data center, complete with all the features that such a data center can best use.

That “just right” approach doesn't just work for bears and porridge; it works well for data centers too. Emerson's new mobile app should go a long way toward providing the kind of extras commonly seen in large-scale systems, a welcome development for those with smaller systems.

Edited by Alicia Young