Emerson launches the LIFE Technology IP-based communications system

Today’s announcement marks the availability of LIFE Technology in North America. LIFE Technology is already available in EMEA and Asia.

LIFE Technology uses advanced service level data and IP-based communication to alert Emerson Network Power customer engineers of potential issues that may impact the life of systems within the data center infrastructure. In the event of a failure, the response would include the immediate dispatch of a service technician armed with detailed knowledge of the problem and the parts needed to fix it. This is a critical difference that could save an organization hours of diagnostics and potential downtime compared to traditional service organizations that rely upon a technician dispatched to the scene to diagnose the problem on site and locating replacement parts that may not arrive until the next day.

“LIFE Technology enabled remote diagnostics and unprecedented communications capabilities will help our customers save hours from failure to repair, drastically reducing Mean Time to Repair and minimizing or avoiding unplanned downtime,” said Dave Saliaris, vice president, Life Cycle Management Services, Emerson Network Power. “Until now, the lack of effective, real-time communication capabilities has limited the performance and wide applicability of today’s advanced monitoring and diagnostics systems. Embedded LIFE Technology removes those limitations and can decrease the average MTTR by nearly 12 hours.”

The system also reduces Mean Time Between Failures by monitoring environmental conditions and usage history and using that data — along with maintenance and service histories — to build data center and equipment profiles. Those profiles help system engineers identify conditions in which a unit may be at greater risk of failure so they may implement corrective actions before a failure occurs.

LIFE™ Technology is embedded in Emerson Network Power UPS systems sold globally. It will be introduced in Emerson cooling systems later this year and in Emerson Network Power infrastructure technologies within the next 12 months. Web card retrofit options are also available for some current Emerson Network Power UPS and cooling systems.

Based off standard data center device data and commands, LIFE Technology utilizes standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol for communication between infrastructure devices and system engineers. The use of HTTP as encapsulating protocol conforms to most common security policies at enterprise firewalls without requiring any direct manual intervention of network administrators. That makes LIFE Technology highly scalable and easily deployed in enterprise scenarios with standard security settings.