While remote monitoring of physical assets isn't a new idea, treating a physical facility as an address on a corporate network and using that network to transport data from sensors to a central management console is just starting to take hold.

One company that's sold on transporting facilities data over corporate networks for automated monitoring is SpectraSite Communications Inc., an owner/operator of thousands of cellular towers scattered across the U.S.

Three years ago, the company had 200 towers, but now it has 10,000, said SpectraSite CIO Brian Dietrich. Sending trucks to check the status of lights and backup power at that many facilities wasn't economically feasible, he said, so SpectraSite decided to invest in a remote management system using technology developed by Opto 22 in Temecula, Calif.

According to Dietrich, the system uses a special server that costs about $2,000 at each tower site to collect data from sensors that monitor tower lights, backup generators and even the electronic keypads used by technicians to access the facility.

That data is then backhauled through a remote dial-up to SpectraSite's headquarters in Cary, N.C., Dietrich said. There, information from all of the towers on the network is collected and reported in Unicenter system management applications from Computer Associates International Inc. in Islandia, N.Y.

Dietrich said his company elected to use Opto 22's technology because it's designed to collect data from different types of sensors, including those that read temperatures, fuel levels and on/off status.

Moreover, he noted, the Opto 22 server translates sensor output into data that can be transported over Ethernet, the network standard used by most large firms.

"We basically pull data from every Opto 22 box twice a day," Dietrich said. But he added that when there's an emergency, such as a tower light outage, "the Opto box calls us."

SpectraSite uses a variety of connections to access the Opto 22 servers, Dietrich said. "For urban tower sites," he said, "we pull information using telephone land lines, fiber-optic and PCS [personal communications services] wireless."

Land lines, which Dietrich said cost his company $40 to $45 per month per tower, are the most expensive to use, while PCS cellular connections run about $30 per month for each tower site. At some sites, Dietrich said he's been able to cut connection costs even further using AT&T Corp.'s Cellular Digital Packet Data wireless service. The AT&T service costs $8 per month plus 5 cents per kilobyte transmitted.

Patrick Dryden, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas, noted that pulling data from remote sensors into the enterprise network requires close cooperation among facilities and IT managers. Corporate IT is usually a world unto itself, as are facilities and process control management, said Dryden.

Both IT and facilities and process control management need to understand that there's a business case for integration, he said.

» posted by ITworld staff

Computerworld

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