HP Offers RFID to Track Data Center Assets

Hewlett-Packard announced Oct. 17 that it has completed a successful test using radio-frequency identification to track assets, specifically servers, in the data center.

The technology, which was developed by HP Labs, used RFID readers and tags to track, in real time, the data center assets of Meijer, a privately held Grand Rapids, Mich. company with almost 200 retail and grocery stores.

Specifically, HP’s RFID solution was used to track several hundred of the company’s servers in the its data center, right down to the computer rack where an individual server was located, said Cyril Brignone, a project manager for HP, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

The solution was able to monitor individual devices within the company’s data center and also tell the IT staff if a new device, such as a server, had been added to the center or if a server or other piece of hardware had been moved from one location to another.

The technology that HP used was then able to create a high-resolution view of devices in the data center and provide historical information related to additions or changes of servers or other assets.

Click here to read more about HP developing RFID and wireless data chips.

“We have created the first real-time automatic asset tracking solution for the data center,” Brignone told eWEEK. “We were able to track any asset down to the rack where it was located.”

Brignone explained that this solution would eliminate the need for IT professionals to make periodic trips to the data center to manually check that all the assets are there.

Brignone and his team have been working on this data center tracking system for several years—HP has been using and developing RFID technology for about four years now—but there was no indication when the solution would become widely available.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: HP Offers RFID to Track Data Center Assets.