Kontron PCCM: PC Condition Monitoring for High-Availability Embedded Computer Systems at Minimal Expense

Continuous Condition Monitoring and Remote Diagnosis Permits the Highest Availability with the Lowest Costs

Eching, Germany, April 16, 2007 – Kontron announces its latest addition to the Kontron IP family of board support software called “PC Condition Monitoring” (PCCM): a powerful API driven hardware interface for monitoring system status in mission critical environments.

The Kontron PCCM directly accesses the condition of the boards, systems and servers and delivers that data to service technicians as user-defined text messages (GSM SMS), e-mails or on-site audible or visual signals. In contrast to the multitude of condition monitoring tools built on ACPI, the Kontron PCCM directly accesses sensor and hardware data via its own API. Thus, the Kontron PCCM solution is unaffected by software or driver updates and therefore is highly reliable.

The Kontron PCCM replaces preventative maintenance by “repair on demand”, greatly reducing the costs of on-site troubleshooting service calls. Required hardware maintenance can frequently be diagnosed early and carried out during planned shutdown times. In addition, system availability increases, since most failures of monitored components can be detected in advance and thus prevented.
Along with alerts via text message or e-mail, condition data can also be displayed via standard web browsers at the system technician’s workstation. Condition diagnosis is intuitive, using a green/yellow/red light system. Even the parameters for trigger and reset thresholds and time delays for noisy or peak parameters can be adjusted via the web interface as needed.

Some examples of measurable condition parameters are
• temperature monitoring of processors, chipsets, chassis, among others
• rpm monitoring of processor and chassis fans and, optionally, of graphics card or power supply fans
• S.M.A.R.T. hard drive monitoring for reporting of defective sectors or long spin-up times
• supply voltages

Provider-specific measurement data from shock and humidity sensors or RAID subsystems can be included via a plug-in interface. A SOAP Web service interface facilitates connection to the customer’s own maintenance systems.

The Kontron PCCM stores condition statistics (minimum, maximum and average values for any given data acquisition) allowing long-term diagnosis. Various storage intervals within and outside the normal operating range reduce the variety of data without losing precision. Data can be exported in CSV format for analysis in other applications or on other sites.

The Kontron PCCM is available for Kontron PICMG1.x slot CPU boards and the Kontron KISS server product family and its functionality can be tailored to meet OEM requirements. Other Kontron product families can be equipped with PCCM on request.