Bob Douglass, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Sensaphone (www.sensaphone.com), says:

Should data center managers be concerned about humidity?

Yes! Both high and low humidity levels will increase the risk of server crashing, lock-ups, and even permanent damage — all of which cause downtime and cost money.

The good news for IT and data center managers is that they should be able to easily screen humidity levels with the same monitoring systems that they use to alert them of changes in temperature and other potentially harmful conditions. In many instances, it is just a matter of including an additional sensor dedicated to measuring the room’s relative humidity.

When tens of thousands of dollars are at stake, it makes sense to monitor every potential threat. We’ve received feedback from many customers that their monitoring system paid for itself after detecting a problem that prevented a single instance of downtime.