Five Years Out, Company Extends Leadership in Web-Based, IT Monitoring Market It Helped Define .
NetBotz today announced several new products that meet the growing customer need to better monitor today’s denser, hotter, more compact and more distributed IT sites. Some 30 percent of a company’s critical infrastructure assets are in unmonitored, sub-optimal locations, says Launch International, a consulting company. Add to that the growing emergence of blade servers, a rack of which the Uptime Institute says can generate “… about the amount of heat given off by two household electric ovens.” The result is a lot of expensive IT assets in increasingly remote hot spots, vulnerable to threats of disruption from environmental and physical conditions that can jeopardize operations and cause expensive downtime. Such factors include excessive heat, low or high humidity, malicious or accidental human acts, the presence of water and much more.
To help customers affordably and easily protect their IT investments from these damaging conditions, NetBotz today unveiled the NetBotz 420 and the NetBotz 320 web-based monitoring appliances, ideal for providing affordable protection for small and medium sized areas. Both new appliances are based on patented, award-winning NetBotz 500 technology.
NetBotz appliances include a “base station,” with sophisticated thresholding and alerting software, plus integrated secure cameras and sensor pods that capture visual, audible and ambient environmental information. Actively monitoring the environment, a NetBotz appliance instantly alerts, via pager, cell phone, email and HTTP post, when specified conditions exceed thresholds. If conditions warrant, NetBotz can also automatically shut down remote devices. Having this information enables staff to know immediately if a site is threatened, which means immediate action can be taken to avoid disaster.
“The NetBotz 420 is definitely a Mercedes disguised as a Volkswagen,” said George Alger, Assistant Division Chief, NASA Ames Research Center, who is using NetBotz to monitor smaller spaces within his facility. “The capability, expandability, and utility of this unit make it an ideal monitoring solution for midsized businesses as well as for large organizations with many small, distributed rooms.”
NetBotz, a recent winner of an IDG Network Award 2004 for “Most Innovative Use of Technology,” also announced the latest version of its centralized management platform, NetBotz Central 2.2. The company, which pioneered the burgeoning web-based monitoring space in 1999, is celebrating its five year anniversary this year with the release of these latest products.
NetBotz Central installs, configures and manages up to 500 NetBotz appliances across an enterprise. High availability and hosting support, critical for managed services providers whose customers don’t want to allow access through their firewalls, are among NetBotz Central’s key new features.
“The problem of affordably protecting an organization’s distributed IT investments from damaging environmental and physical conditions is a conundrum,” said Mitch Medford, NetBotz CTO. “While companies don’t have the budget to devote headcount to watch each IT room, the average wiring closet contains $150,000-$300,000 of equipment and a typical small server room often houses more than three times that amount. Do the math. If something happens in one of those rooms and no one finds out in time, monetary and business losses can be quite high. Our newest appliances are responses to this seeming contradiction of deploying high value monitoring for these smaller sites, at an affordable cost. Each new NetBotz appliance packs a lot of capability at a price range that will enable every organization to protect its more compact, unmanned, distributed locations.”
New Monitoring Appliances for Protection of Smaller Sites
The NetBotz 420 and 320 appliances share a number of advanced features of the market leading, award-winning NetBotz 500, such as: a Linux-based operating system; higher camera resolutions and frame rates; advanced alert customization; and SSL encryption. In addition, the NetBotz 420 offers moderate expansion via a USB 1.1 port, which gives users greater deployment flexibility by enabling them to attach an additional camera pod or CCTV Adapter Pod and four additional sensor pods. For more detailed information about these two new appliances, go to www.netbotz.com/cmpns/420_320.html.
Powerful Central Management
NetBotz Central 2.2., the latest version of the company’s centralized management platform, provides high-availability via its dual-system redundancy. This makes it a valuable piece of a company’s disaster recovery initiative. If the primary NetBotz Central goes down, a secondary one takes over. In addition, NetBotz Central 2.2 now provides hosting support. This solves a security issue for managed services providers whose customers lie behind a firewall. By forcing all communications to flow “upstream” from NetBotz appliances to NetBotz Central, customers of managed service providers don’t need to grant inbound access to their networks. For more information about NetBotz Central 2.2, go to www.netbotz.com/cmpns/nbc22.html.
All products are available immediately through the NetBotz chain of distributors, accredited resellers and solution partners.
More than 2,500 leading organizations in 35 countries use NetBotz, including close to 300 educational, 100 financial and 125 healthcare institutions as well as 325 critical government agencies and departments and scores of Fortune 1000 companies.
One of those customers, Pete Diamantis of the Chicago Stock Exchange, said: “NetBotz kept us out of hot water right from the start.” Among other things, NetBotz provided the backup data he needed to prove a new cooling system wasn’t working adequately. According to Diamantis, this alone has saved the exchange many times over what it cost to deploy NetBotz.
The Growth of the Web-Based Monitoring Market
Since 1999, when the company first pioneered the concept of leveraging IP networks to deliver 24×7 monitoring of the physical environment, the need for environmental and physical monitoring has escalated. NetBotz is the first company to offer monitoring solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to protect their assets — from IT infrastructure to hospital freezers that store delicate tissue samples. The maturing capabilities of these offerings, including wireless sensors and remote control over equipment, attests to the growing awareness about the importance of affordable monitoring for corporate assets.
Several factors lie behind this surge:
1) The increasing density of the internal workings of network equipment and the heat that they emit. According to Kenneth Brill, executive director, Uptime Institute, “Some blade users have reported as much as 14 kilowatts of heat output/rack, about the amount of heat given off by two household electric ovens.”
2) The physical density of the spaces in which the gear is placed has increased, creating hot spots that threaten to raise temperatures above required thresholds. Computer equipment ages faster when it gets hot. According to the Uptime Institute, “For every increase of 18 degrees F above 70 degrees F, long-term electronics reliability is reduced by 50 percent.”
3) The physical distribution of the network into remote closets, data centers and other facilities, making it virtually impossible to provide 24×7 monitoring of out-of-the way places; and,
4) The reuse of inadequate spaces to house sensitive electronic equipment. In addition, there’s the rising threat of harmful human activity to expensive assets.
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