Network Cabling Magazine, November 2005 issue
To ensure the safety of a hearing impaired employee, Corrections Canada recently installed a monitoring device that notifies her, through her Blackberry, of any emergency in the building. Preventing or detecting an emergency, be it a fire, flood or IT break-in, in any building requires a versatile and reliable monitoring solution. So imagine a situation, where a fire alarm rings in a facility, and one of the people in that particular building cannot hear the alarm because he or she is hearing impaired.
This is exactly the case at a Corrections Canada office in Ottawa, Ont., where in order to ensure the safety of one of its hearing-impaired female employees, it had to implement another format (besides fire alarm) to notify her of an emergency. Initially, a buddy system was in place, but last year, a fire alarm sounded at a time when the woman’s buddy was out for lunch.
So after conducting its own research and brainstorming with the Canadian Hearing Society, the government department decided to install NetBotz, an IP-based monitoring solution that protects critical assets and spaces from environmental harm.
“It’s not a typical application,” says John Davidson, president of Adasca Telecommunications, the Ottawa-based company charged with the responsibility of integrating the NetBotz solution into the Corrections Canada facility. “For the hearing impaired [employee], whenever a fire alarm goes off, [NetBotz] triggers an [instant message] to be sent to her on her Blackberry.”
Adasca is a full-service telecommu-nications firm providing design and installation services for multimedia, physical and environmental moni-toring, and base-building telecommu-nications systems. It was first introduced to NetBotz through a local manufacturer’s representative in the Ottawa area, and according to Davidson, the product immediately piqued his interest for several reasons, including the opportunity to penetrate new accounts and provide current clients with a worthwhile technology.
“Installation of these appliances is a logical extension of our core cabling business,” he says, adding Adasca’s traditional market is structured cabling systems, which means its staff spend a lot of time in data centres, telecommunications rooms and riser rooms.
Appliances like NetBotz addresses many of the problems our clients experience on a regular basis, Davidson notes, such as over-heating, humidity, flooding and access control.
With NetBotz, no matter where the employee is in the world, if there is an issue in the building, an instant message can be sent to her Blackberry. On a monthly basis, Corrections Canada tests the application and recently, a real alarm went off without a hitch.
“We had a real alarm and it went very well,” says Monique Gauthier, an accommodation officer at Corrections Canada. “She (the employee) was very happy because she felt safe.”
Gauthier adds that other government minis-tries are seeking to have the device installed following its success at Corrections Canada. And with the Canadian Hearing Society touting the solution and its implementation, do not be surprised if this happens sooner, rather than later.
“It’s functional and it meets the application perfectly,” says Brad Smith, a technical devices specialist at the Canadian Hearing Society. “If we get another demand or requirement for an alerting system in an office building, we will use [NetBotz] because it’s perfect.”
In addition to the fire notification, the application monitors temperature, humidity and airflow in areas of facilities with critical assets, such as server rooms and data centres.
“With environments like a server room, there’s a [temperature] range, wherein the equipment will be safe,” explains Godfrey Wylde, NetBotz’s director of channel sales in Canada. “Should the temperature rise above a certain point, an alert is sent by e-mail, page, or telephone to somebody who is empowered to initiate an investiga-tion as to why the temperature is rising in that location.
“We can also monitor the rate of change, so if you’ve hit a certain threshold and the temperature is rising at a rate that would indicate something is wrong, like a broken air conditioning unit, we can send an alert about that as well,” he adds.
At 19-inches wide and eight-inches deep, the unit can “hang off” an existing network or phone line and is built with up to 17 environmental sensors. It can include up to four camera pods and is able to interface with thousands of third-party appliances.
The appliance works in a “plug and play” format, with a standard RJ45 Ethernet port that can run on the existing infrastructure and the environmental sensors connected through USB ports.
“The sensors themselves will monitor things like temperature, humidity, airflow and dew point,” says Wylde. “We can also hook up to other devices through what’s known as a dry contact, whereby two wires hook up to a terminal on a device and when the device is activated, it would close the circuit on those two wires, thus sending an alert or notification.”
At Corrections Canada, more specifically, the system is set up in such a way that through the dry contact connectivity, the smoke alarm is connected to the NetBotz, so that when the smoke alarm is triggered, it initiates an alarm, sent immediately to the female employee’s Blackberry.
As for the cameras on the NetBotz, they are triggered by motion and can be used for a variety of purposes, including physical security.
“If the camera senses motion, it will log that event, then start taking pictures until the motion ceases. Those jpeg [images] can be strung together to form an mpeg so you can have a complete visual record, as well as a statistical record, of people and events taking place,” Wylde explains. “You can program or change the resolution of the camera up to 1240 x 1048 or all the way down to 160 x 120.”
Adasca’s Davidson notes the capabilities of NetBotz may lead to a paradigm shift at many companies, where network security begins to focus on risky environmental issues, and not only traditional issues, such as firewalls.
“A lot of people are investing a lot of time and money on network security for things like hackers and viruses,” opines Davidson. “Nobody is paying attention to environmental factors; 75 to 80 per cent of network problems are environmental or human error, so these appliances are aimed at that market.”
Wylde agrees.
“Firewalls, intrusion prevention and all of these defense mechanisms protect your network, but if your network goes down because of a water leak or the temperature has risen causing the server to crash, the bottom line is that the network is down,” Wylde says. “We have to put [environmental factors] in the same context and give it the same bandwidth and heightened awareness people now have for things like viruses.”
Some more recent environments where NetBotz has been installed are in hospitals and laboratories to monitor tissue samples and even facilities linked to space agencies, where it tracks hydrogen levels.
For any company, especially one focusing on the IT sector, deciding to sell a new technology is never easy as there are definite risks involved, but for Davidson, companies, like his, that have ample experience in the design and installation of voice and data networks, the migration to products like the NetBotz is a natural one
“The challenges we face do not come from the appliances themselves,” he says. “Our biggest challenge comes from assembling all of the groups that NetBotz can benefit in an organization, like telecom, IT, facilities and security, and capturing their requirements.”
To date, Davidson is pleased with the demand Adasca’s current client base is showing for the technology. He admits the company is starting to make in-roads with new clients, particular due to NetBotz recently receiving approval from the Department of National Defence, and the fact that several high profile corporate and government agencies are reviewing proposals for multi-national implementation.
Adam Michael Segal is a freelance writer in Thornhill, Ont.
