American Power Conversion Corp. (APC, West Kingston, RI) announced new features to its existing network management cards, adding environmental monitoring and remote management of UPS systems via an on-board modem to its existing power management capabilities. The environmental monitoring feature addresses the risk to system availability due to temperature and humidity concerns, sending alerts when the changes to the ambient temperature and humidity reach levels outside of the user-set parameters.
The new on-board modem feature provides an additional layer of redundancy by allowing the user to monitor network failures and receive event notification at remote sites. Basic features consist of data logging of UPS data such as voltage and loads that help to diagnose UPS/power problems and prevent future problems from occurring; scheduling of equipment reboots and shutdown; notification of UPS-related events through e-mail, pager, PDA or WAP-enabled phone; and unattended shutdown via APC's PowerChute® network shutdown.
The network management card with environmental monitoring and the network management card with modem and environmental monitoring are currently available in most countries worldwide and have an estimated resale price of $399 and $489, respectively.
