Listen to this articleAVTECH started in 1988 with the goal of helping organizations monitor their systems and networks to help improve their uptime. As the data center market began to grow, the company recognized that environment factors such as temperature, humidity, flood, power, smoke, and air flow weren’t able to be easily monitored by the IT team that would be tasked with recovering from an issue caused by those environment conditions. So the company decided to build a solution for monitoring such environmental factors. To find out more about their software we sat down with Richard Grundy, President of AVTECH Software, Inc.:
Q: What is AVTECH Software’s background in the data center and environment monitoring industry?
A: Security has always been a primary focus for organizations when it comes to preventing downtime and data loss, and rightfully so. However, many organizations don’t realize that almost 30% of their outages are directly due to environment factors, and common security installations such as firewalls and network software aren’t monitoring for those.
We recognized the opportunity to help increase data center uptime by allowing users to monitor, log, and report on those environment factors, and that’s been our main focus since then. With users in 184 countries, we’ve seen nearly every situation there is, and we can help our users monitor for these conditions and ultimately prevent downtime and damage.
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Q: What is the function and advantages of your Room Alert environment monitoring solutions?
A: Room Alert is designed to help monitor the environment in any type of facility. We offer a wide range of models that can help to monitor everything from a small IT closet through large-scale data centers and warehouses. Many other users have Room Alert protecting restaurants, medical and pharmaceutical sites, residential and commercial real estate and more.
We also offer a full range of sensors that are compatible with all of our current Room Alert environment monitors, so each user can customize their monitoring setup based on their own needs.
One of the biggest factors we always take into consideration when developing Room Alert is ease of use. We want our users to be able to take Room Alert out of the box, connect it to their network, and have it up and running in a matter of minutes. Based on that ease of use and having a full range of sensors for any environment condition, many users start small then quickly expand their monitoring to many other areas within the facility.
We’ve found that users will often be alerted to environment issues that they had no idea were occurring, thanks to immediate alerts as well as reports from their Room Alert. Not only are they helping to prevent downtime, they are also able to take preventative measures based on trends that Room Alert is reporting to them.
Q: Who are the primary users of Room Alert and what are some of the key challenges you are helping them solve?
A: Our primary user base has always been data centers. They need to keep environment conditions such as temperature and humidity within very specific ranges to help prevent server crashes and data loss. Room Alert helps to notify them of any problems that occur, such rising temperatures, too much moisture in the air, or power loss.
Some users have let us know that before they installed Room Alert, their notifications of servers being down only came once they were unreachable, and by then it was too late. With Room Alert, they can be notified if the temperature is exceeding a certain point, or if power in part of their facility has gone out.
In recent years, we’ve seen our user base grow far beyond just data center and IT needs. Schools are using Room Alert to monitor classroom temperature, warehouses are monitoring relative humidity and the heat index to make sure their employees are working in comfortable and safe conditions, and we’ve seen a large increase in facilities managers using Room Alert as part of the overall trend towards smart buildings. Effective building and facility management requires detailed information about how the building is performing, and Room Alert provides just that.
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Q: What is unique about AVTECH’s Room Alert and how does it stand out from the competition?
A: We’re proud to have all of our products designed, manufactured and supported in the USA. Having an active role in our manufacturing and supply chain has allowed us to offer products that are reliable, affordable, and easy to use.
Offering a wide range of sensors allows our users to make sure that their monitoring covers every possible area of their facility, and the factors they are most concerned with. We also offer two different software monitoring platforms, Device ManageR for local monitoring and GoToMyDevices for cloud-based monitoring, that users can combine or use separately to customize their alerts and reporting from their Room Alert monitors.
Organizations who already use a network monitoring package can easily integrate Room Alert into their existing platform, providing them with the ability to set up environment monitoring in a matter of minutes.
All of our hardware and software are fully designed and developed by our team in our Rhode Island headquarters, which is also where our support department is located. By keeping our engineering and support in-house and within the same facility, we’re able to easily help users with questions or unique situations that may involve some work across departments.
When you call AVTECH, we’ve got real people that answer the phone right in our office that have hands-on experience with all of our products. We don’t outsource any part of our support or manufacturing, so we can provide the best customer experience possible.
Q: What are some of the recent new products and releases that have helped your users better monitor their environment?
A: We just introduced the Active Power Sensor which helps monitor the power status of nearly any AC-powered device, in addition to monitoring temperature. It’s small size and low price-point will help data centers monitor the power status of servers, switches, firewalls, and many other appliances without the need to physically modify a power cable, power down the equipment, or involve an electrician.
The Active Power Sensor can also monitor other non-IT devices like freezers, HVAC units, pumps, and so much more. It’s a great addition to a suite of sensors that already provides some of the best environment monitoring coverage in the industry.
All our Room Alert monitors are designed with custom-built firmware to help keep them secure, and they are designed with one-way communication in mind to help prevent the possibility of malicious traffic. To help better provide peace of mind to our users, we’ll be introducing even more security features to our models shortly. Given recent events with IoT devices and Internet security, we want our users to know that they are relying on some of the most secure hardware available.
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