Application Note
Monitoring temperature,
humidity, and airflow
in data centers
A market in need of measurement
F r o m t h e F l u k e D i g i t a l L i b r a r y @ w w w . f l u k e . c o m / l i b r a r y
Using a Fluke Ti20 Thermal Imager and a
Fluke 975V AirMeter™ test tool, customers
protect their servers by monitoring envi-
ronments in rented data centers.
The international law firm
depicted in this story owns no
data centers, despite the large
amount of data it stores and
retrieves. Like many other high-
tech companies, it rents space for
its servers in data centers owned
by others. “The sites we use are
just hosts,” says the law firm’s
data center support analyst. “The
racks we have there are ours, but
we rent the environment, power
and the bandwidth.”
Each of the firm’s offices has
one or two racks of servers in a
local data center to service that
site’s needs. In addition, the
company has a centralized U.S.
server location, a secondary cen-
ter for backup and redundancy,
and plans for new locations
overseas.
Fluke instruments used
At present, the analyst uses two
Fluke instruments to monitor the
firm’s data centers and the status
of its servers in those centers:
The Fluke 975 AirMeter can
record ten fundamental param-
eters associated with indoor air
quality. Of special importance to
data centers are air temperature,
relative humidity, and airflow (air
velocity). Since servers generate
considerable heat, they must be
cooled to manufacturer-specified
temperatures and subjected to no
more than 45 to 50 percent rela-
tive humidity.
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