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As a general rule, inventory is a huge chore no matter what business you’re in. For some businesses, there’s a much larger margin of error they can afford than in others. In a data center environment, inventory time can find you loosing track of machines that cost massive amounts of money and may still be bearing a load of networking traffic, even though you can’t locate them physically. As any network engineer will tell you, tracking down equipment–often by tracing cables under floors and above ceilings–is not a favorite task among new technicians.
On September 8th, RF Code announced that it has created a new (and very welcome) fully automated inventory tracking system for data centers. The new system combines active RFID technology (battery powered for a stronger signal) with infrared. Since infrared basically only works within a line of sight, the new system places infrared detection systems within each rack. It then combines this with RFID readers mounted on the ceiling of the data center. The RFID readers can gather rack level information, or device-level information. Within each rack, devices are all given asset tags which are infrared and RFID capable. The new system is also designed to be easily installed, not requiring an RFID or wireless expert.
The hybrid technology the new system uses is similar to systems RF Code had developed for use in the health care industries. RF Code has been offering inventory systems for data centers since 2008, but previous systems were more expensive, requiring a pricy RFID reader for each individual rack. With the new system, a single RFID reader will probably suffice for an entire data center. The new system also takes into account the growing trend in data centers towards open racks, as opposed to closed cabinets. Open racks save money and energy that would have gone to cooling, by allowing better airflow; now, infrared technology makes automatic inventory tracking in open racks possible.