Enhancing security with integrated surveillance, sensing and access control

Schneider Electric has announced the new APC NetBotz Monitoring and Management System to bring enhanced monitoring, management, and control to IT environments.
The new NetBotz appliance lineup features NetBotz Rack Monitor 750 and the NetBotz Camera Pod 165.
Continuing 20 years of innovation in data center and IT environment monitoring, the NetBotz 750 introduces a powerful new software platform and simplified sensor management, as the first line of defense against IT downtime. Designed to provide IT professionals with the visibility and monitoring needed to contend with physical and environmental threats to edge data centers, such as high heat and humidity, water leaks, smoke and fire, as well as theft and accidental errors by people with access to the physical infrastructure. As an EcoStruxure Ready device, alerts and sensor data from multiple NetBotz monitoring units can be managed centrally in the cloud-based DCIM platform, EcoStruxure IT.
“IT equipment has become so resilient in recent years that people sometimes forget how much the environment matters,” said Ron Catanzaro, vice president of Rack Systems and NetBotz, Schneider Electric. “With the proliferation of edge networks today, IT is frequently deployed in atypical compute locations with high foot traffic and unpredictable environmental conditions, so it is critical to introduce sensing, surveillance, and access control. The next generation of NetBotz is the solution ready to protect these highly specialized environments.”
Organizations lose as much as $100 million a year to downtime, according to Infonetics Research, and common environmental risks like leaks, high heat, and humidity accounted for 11 per cent of all data center outages in a calendar year.
Building on the best-in-class security and environmental monitoring of the current NetBotz product suite, the features of the next generation product line include:

• Integrated surveillance, sensing, and badge access control requiring only a single IP address simplifies management and speeds installation;
• New high definition, low-light cameras provide the enhanced visibility required to mitigate unique edge data center threats;
• Video clip capture based on alerts like motion detected or door opened reduces complexity in managing surveillance footage;
• Combination of badge rack access control and clip capture provides a powerful audit trail, helping organizations maintain compliance with various data standards bodies;
• Native support for wireless sensors speeds installation, eliminating the rigid cabling infrastructure typically required of environmental monitoring.

The NetBotz Rack Monitor 750 and Camera Pod 165 are available now. The NetBotz 250, which was launched in 2016, will continue as the entry-level environmental monitoring solution.
www.schneider-electric.com