MDS updates server monitoring software

specialises in high availability co-location and managed services, and currently operates a tier 1 facility in Corsham, Wiltshire as well as tier 2 facility in Crawley, West Sussex. A tier 3 facility is currently undergoing testing in Newport, South Wales.

The company has now updated its (Assessing, Monitoring, Alerting and Reporting) software, which is used in its facilities to monitor a number of variables including server temperature, fan speed and environmental humidity, as well as power usage, connectivity and bandwidth usage. Customers include Vodafone, HP, and Guys & St Thomas Hospital Trust.

"The principle of business continuity is at the hub of data centre management and AMAR II is at the hub of our operations," said Phil Dawson, MD at MDS Technologies. "It is proprietary to our business, which is to offer a range of high availability hosting and collocation services."

Encoded within AMAR II is an alerting system with tiered priority levels based on the nature and extent of tolerance breaches. Alerts to IT engineers include pager, email and text message notifications.

"It can monitor the temperature at the row or rack level, or the temperature of the room itself," said Dawson. "The software's computational dynamics can help identify when potential issues are arising. For example, we can tell very quickly if certain components have become less efficient, and then we can do proactive maintenance rather than reactive maintenance."