Case Study: AKCP SensorProbe+ Monitors Server Rooms at England & Wales Cricket Board

Despite the game of cricket being several hundred years old, it has moved with the times, adopting technologies that help to ensure fair play. Ball by ball data is now available thanks to systems such as the “Hawkeye ball tracking camera”. These systems have become integral to the sport.

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) have several server rooms around the UK that are responsible for various cricket operations support functions the recording, playback and analysis of this ball by ball data. Recently, problems with one particular site responsible for this ball by ball data were becoming apparent.

“Random power trips were knocking the aircon offline. When the power was restored the aircon did not automatically re-engage. This resulted in the server room overheating. Rack air inlet temperatures were reaching 35°C! Our out of date, 11 year old temperature monitoring system was not sufficient. It simply sent an email alert, which was no use on a Friday evening when nobody will read it until Monday morning.” Says Rob Wilkinson, IT Project Manager for the England and Wales Cricket Board. We asked the guys at our technology support partner Sumillion to find us a solution.

Sumillion and AKCP’s UK distributor, Server Room Environments, worked together to assure the ECB of an affordable and up to date system: the sensorProbe2+ Professional with 4G cellular modem. The modem means text2speech meaningful voice calls can be placed during out of office hours, alerting necessary non-technical staff to take immediate action.

“It’s already done its job” says Rob, “While piloting the solution at one site, we were taken off-grid to generator backup power for a weekend. Instructions were given to ensure the aircon was turned back on after the switchover, but it wasn’t. The sensorProbe2+ Professional alerted the team at 6:30 in the morning with voice calls and SMS messages to individual mobile phones, notifying us of the problem. This allowed us to take immediate action, calling the site manager to get the air conditioning unit turned back on. We’re now looking at replicating this installation across all of our sites during the year”.

This is a common problem amongst remote sites, edge data centres and server rooms, which are often unmanaged, or you are relying on the staff at these locations to act. The AKCP sensorProbe2+ is part of the sensorProbe+ family of products that can cover the simplest requirements of a single temperature sensor, up to complex data centres requiring thousands of sensors.