Hewlett-Packard has developed technology to track servers and other data center equipment with radio frequency ID chips (RFID, and has tested the system at Meijer, a grocery chain with almost 200 stores.
HP’s RFID solution was used to track several hundred of the company’s servers in its data center, said Cyril Brignone, a project manager for HP, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif. “We have created the first real-time automatic asset tracking solution for the data center,” Brignone told
eWEEK [1]. “We were able to track any asset down to the rack where it was located.”
HP said the technology isn’t ready for commercial use, calling the Meijer installation a “proof of concept” test. HP said it has also been using a similar solution in its own internal supply chain. I could see this technology being really useful during data center migrations and relocations, particularly in a move like that undertaken by Bloglines when it
relocated from California to Massachusetts [2] last December.
Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.
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URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2006/10/18/hp-tracks-servers-with-rfid-chips/
URLs in this post:
[1] eWEEK: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2032684,00.asp
[2] relocated from California to Massachusetts: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2006/Jan/06/bloglines_anatomy_of_a_data_center_move.html
[3] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/
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