RF Code Focuses on Data Center Monitoring and Edge Computing

welcome to zcast everyone i'm cs caraval from ck research and i'm here for another thought leadership video and i'm joined today by john guy who's the vp of engineering for a pretty interesting company called rf code uh john want to introduce yourself to everybody tell us what you do and tell us who rf code is sure yeah thanks for having me uh yes i'm john guy i manage the engineering organization at rf code we provide real-time monitoring solutions for data centers and remote assets and also provide those systems into a number of industrial applications as well my team is responsible for developing the software and the hardware that makes those systems special well we're going to talk about you know some of the changes in the industry and remote monitoring before i do that though i'm going to give you a quick shout out to e-week ebec is my media partner and all c casts are done in conjunction with the ebt speaks program so john um you know before we start talking about our code specifically let's talk about the state of the industry i'm sure you talked to a lot of customers what are you hearing from your customers today what's what's the post pandemic ip organization going to look like well um one of the things we've seen coming out of the pandemic is it's really accelerated certain industry trends it's really providing a lot more a lot more factors that drive remote distributed computing uh we're seeing of course workers working remotely it's seeing uh heightened awareness of the risks of having centralized resources and and i think it's also brought more of a global focus i think it's brought awareness of how uh events can affect not just one country but can uh quickly translate into global issues and so if you're looking at your global infrastructure as a multinational company or even as a small business that may be influenced by uh by geopolitical events i i think you're thinking twice about how you manage risk and the moves you take proactively to uh to reduce risk in your business yeah i think one of the interesting aspects to pandemic too is there's a lot but a lot of media focus on the impact of the worker right people we're in hybrid work what does that mean for them you know both mentally and physically and things like that very little attention has been given to the it pro though who also has to work remote and has to make these things work and has to has had to adopt new technologies and we've seen you know the complexity of ip uh certainly increase in fact i i did a focus group with the group of cios a little while a little while ago and you know i think all of them would say that complexity has grown disproportionately to the level that their budgets and their staffing increase you know it has so that's had kind of an interesting uh it's i suppose it's a very interesting undertold story uh you know with respect to what we cover in the media so um you know so what kind of what you described there what kind of new challenges does that create for it particularly in the area that you focus on with the data center where historically you know before i was an analyst i was actually an i.t pro and i know we would just people our way out of data generations just through more people at it you had a lot of people local and you could do that but you can't do that anymore so you know what what what are some of those new challenges that i your customers should be thinking about well yeah and just just as you say the ability to put somebody on a plane to go somewhere to fix a problem and even once they get there uh depending on lockdowns or status or or health issues they may not even be able to enter the facility and so it's important to have uh eyes and have data out of that out of that operation or out of that part of your business um and you can't as you say you can't rely because of um not just health issues but staff shortages uh due to people being out of work or just challenge recruiting the right people doing more with less people um and doing that through data through sensors uh through um monitoring systems is uh even more critical part of of any business today yeah so do more with less right that's something we've talked about we've always heard that uh and that is uh it's uh it's easy to say it's difficult to do and i know every time we go through one of these transitions um it seems like the tools that we use to manage and monitor our environments change but we often don't change them until we're at a point where we simply it's simply not tenable to do it the old way anymore right so if it pros want to get a bit of a jump on this on in this new world that we live in what are the kinds of things they should be thinking about um you know from a tools perspective to help them in a world where remote dynamism distributed you know things like that are not the norm right well at rf code we break this down into three categories one is is asset security um that's is the physical location of the assets themselves and the second aspect to that is um is power systems which of course has got a lot of attention recently with the strain on the power grid um and that translates into inside facilities as well and then the third aspect is environmental monitoring um that is checking the temperature the humidity the cooling capacity the airflow in an environment and what rf code provides is a real time way to monitor all of those parameters to see this on a single dashboard that you can customize around the specific requirements to your organization so depending on how your uh infrastructure is is put together you can get insights that are uniquely tailored to the parameters that you care about you can get alerts you can get email reports notifications uh to give you insights so it's it's both reactive when something moves out of specification but it's also proactive in being able to drill down the data to generate reports you can pull into your business tools or integrate with other systems to stay ahead of a problem um and of course that is this is the best way to to handle it to be to be truly proactive and so our systems because they're wireless and use a proprietary 433 megahertz technology are really ideally suited to these environments these large-scale data centers but also to more distributed computing situations well how the proactivity is kind of interesting because you know i'm i write for a lot of public media sites and it seems for years we've been talking about this trend right he's going to become more proactive and it's it's been you know kind of an argument to mine as uh i guess as a former i.t pro sometimes i'm offended by that statement because i think it's wanting to be more proactive they just didn't really have the data to do it right and uh and so how are you taking this kind of massive amount of data that's out there and turning it into insights that allows it to actually be proactive right um well we have um dashboards that are part of it and that is digesting it down so for example if you're monitoring uh uh power you're taking the data from the pdus uh we pull it in through our system so it's an out-of-band system and um in the case of power you can take a look at your power utilization as a percentage of your overall capacity you can look at load phase and balancing if you have more computing assets on one phase and another you can get ahead of that problem so that's just one very specific example of the sort of data that you can uh get a look at from rf code stand escape system right now um i think initially i kind of bucketed our code as the data center uh you know management vendor but you actually uh work with other i.t domains correct like what what do you do in the non-data center areas i suppose right well uh does the data center the core large-scale data state of business and many of these are private cloud businesses then we also have quite a presence in co-located compute resources where you've got multiple organizations and the same facility and then looking out beyond that as you move to what some people call the edge or which really um in many cases as simple as a lights out data closet uh we have solutions for that as well and this is increasingly part of our focus as more of these compute resources get closer to uh to the edge to the to the customer uh due to latency or reliability or um or just the amount of data that's being moved around keeping it locally and making decisions locally makes a lot more sense i'm glad you brought up the e-word uh being edge um well can you can you help define what that is i hear every vendor today talk about edge and um you know so there's i hear about iot edge campus edge wi-fi edge you know what from your perspective what what exactly is the edge well i think um from my perspective it really depends a lot on where you're standing you know when you when you look out across maybe you're looking out from the data center the edge to you maybe some remote compute resources in a data closet of course if you were to walk out to the data closet your perspective might change a little bit again because then you see well actually there's even more distributed resources there may be some some point of sale systems or some some asset management equipment scanning barcode scanners things like that that go a little closer to the edge and then probably if you move out to that point you're going to look a little further i come from a semiconductor background and you're going to see chips inside of systems that they would consider the edge cameras that are enabled with intelligence so i don't think it's a one-size-fits-all answer it's almost the closer you get to the edge you see there's a little more edge out there but for um which is what makes it so fascinating right uh we we're pulling all of this um this data from this uh evolving edge and it's all important because every every decision point every computer no matter how distributed it is is important to the health of the organization so really it's all of that but depending on where you you're standing it may be a slightly different definition which i think is um which is why you get so many different answers to that question yeah well and i suppose that's what drives the complexity up right it's just there isn't you know data centers were fairly easy to understand there was one centralized location for data and from my perspective i thought of the edges just anything that's not that centralized data center all those other areas are you know i guess are edgy um you know and add to the complexity so if um you know for anyone watching this video if they're if they're struggling with what to do you know in some of the areas you're playing how do they get started so describe your product how it works how it gets deployed you know what the deployment models like things like that right well uh our primary product centerscape uh uses the 433 megahertz technology and has wireless sensors and a reader gateway that's installed on site so this would typically be installed uh inside your own network you manage it you own the software you install the software on your computer resources now it does support very large scale that's not to say it's just at a single location it can be run across a globally distributed organization so that's great for data centers that gives you the ability to also branch out with your on-prem network to to your own closets and now we have a new solution that's coming that's more of a cloud-based uh solution uh and so this is ideal for customers that may not be operating their own data centers but want to have uh visit the same sort of visibility on the distributed locations this new product is called century and we announced it in april and we'll be shipping very soon and can they work in a hybrid model uh absolutely yeah we um we have uh edge support for distributed data closets with our existing sandscape solution with support for cameras and uh to give you visibility if you have remote locations or if you're looking more if you're not already set up with our cinescape solution it may be that sentry is the right fit for your monitoring needs and so if uh can can you give into a little bit of detail too on you know from a road map perspective uh somebody deploys your solution today what do they get and then what's coming in the future okay well with um with sandscape uh what they get today is is a big range of sensors as well as a lot of integrations and so we have integrations at the sensor level for example i think i mentioned earlier uh we have the ability to take data from uh pdu's power distribution units and really the the cool thing about what we do there is it doesn't require cabling to those pdus in some pdu models will connect up to the uh to the serial port in other pdus we actually support snmp so that we can go in and get the data um over a standardized bus and so that means again no cabling because it's a a unidirectional uh wireless interface there's no security concerns for somebody going and taking control of your pdu so we give you visibility on that and then we have other sensors for other integrations and some that are customized so we have very standard generic interfaces like uh four to twenty and zero to five volt if you want to get data from another system uh and then we have integrations within our census apes cinescape software into building automation systems um into um into really any other software tool that you would want to integrate into your data center so rf codes sandscape solution can be your pane of glass or if you already have existing systems that you want to work with we can do that too all right thanks for that john just one last question then um if uh if someone's watching this they want to learn more about your product and uh you know get going uh where should they go well you can head to rfcode.com century that has all the details on our new century edge monitoring product uh this is the product that will give you a view of your lights out data closet or any other remote edge uh environment that you want to bring get visibility in to get ahead of those problems okay and for those of you watching i'll make sure i include that link in the product in the youtube description down below so uh anyways john uh anything else to add i think this is uh been a pretty interesting discussion i think one of the key messages i'm taking away from this is that you know the it pro's job today is significantly different than it was even two years ago and along with that comes you know the need for new tools and if you're using legacy tools to manage kind of a next generation business you're probably destined to fail so uh so i don't know if you have anything else to add uh i think that's a great summary thanks for letting me uh speak about this and uh yeah please check out rfcode.com and take a look at our products all right well thanks for joining me on behalf of john i'm zs caraval from zk research don't forget to click to subscribe and i'll see you next time on zcast you

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