Oper8 Global
RFCode by Oper8
Wireless Asset Management and Environmental Management Solution
Check the new Oper8 Premier Edge Bundle targeting small, mission critical remote and Edge locations that are key to your business.
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Asset Management
Wireless asset sensor tags (RF or Infrared) attach to your IT, mobile and data centre assets to present real-time location visibility through the CenterScape portal.
With the extensible database backend, track and record purchase details, age, asset type with real-time location visibility.
RF Asset Tags
Using the RF Gateway (fixed or mobile) to detect sensors within range of the Gateway:
- Room level (RF Reader) location awareness
- 3-5 year battery life
- Ruggedised options available
IR Asset Tags
Enable real-time asset tracking for IT and other mobile assets:
- Rack and Room level (RF Reader) location awareness
- Requires IR Room Beacons and IR Rack Beacons (per rack)
- Tamper and Motion sensing tags optional
- optional fully sealed sensors for harsh environments
- 3-5 year battery life
Real-time Asset Location
Using a combination of RF Gateways, Infrared Room Locators, and Infrared Rack Locator kits, track assets in real-time from room to IT rack level. Make it easy to find a particular IT asset in your data centre, lab or store room.
Environmental Monitoring
Wireless sensors enable fast, wire free deployment of:
- temperature / humidity
- door open
- dry contact
- fluid detection
- differential air pressure
- Rack PDUs (model dependent)
- AC Voltage (detection only)
- 4-20mA sensing
- 0-5V sensing
Multi-Site Solutions
RFCode RF Gateways (readers) can be deployed at remote edge and branch office locations with ‘back to base’ connectivity presenting encryped sensor data to the CenterScape Portal. Track your assets and environmental conditions across 1000’s of sites in real-time.
RF Gateways (Readers)
Two different models of RF Gateways are available:
- Fixed RF Gateways for deployment in data-centers, industrial applications, hospitals, office areas or any site that requires persistent visibility of RFCode asset tags and sensors (POE or Mains Power with Power Pack).
- Mobile RF Gateways can be used only with custom software or Mobile Track Lite software. Common uses are branded applications in oil and gas, and for use with Mobile Track Lite to find tags in a data center (USB power with rechargeable lithium polymer battery pack).
CenterScape Central Portal
Online centralised portal delivers a single pane of glass to present sensor data, asset management, custom reporting, threshold and real-time alerts, user and group management and custom dashboards.
Maps and Floor Plans
Overlay real-time sensor data on Maps and Floor Plans that align with your data centre, office, warehouse or lab.
Custom Dashboards
Create your own custom dashboards with a simple to use management interface.
Unlimited Sites
No licensing or restrictions on the number of remote sites reporting back to CenterScape enterprise edition.
Note: to obtain access to the optional Edge Features, licensing is applied per remote site if requested.
Unlimited Users
No licensing or restrictions on the number of users or user groups configured to access the CenterScape Portal.
DCIM
RFCode – Real-Time Visibility
RFCode delivering DCIM for the Edge
RFCode delivers a range of wireless asset and environmental sensors that offer fast deployment both across centralised colocation and remote Edge sites.
Cost Effective Edge Visibility
Edge data centre locations, remote branch and edge compute nodes need to be visible from a central location. With a single RF Gateway and a few environmental sensors, you can quickly and cost effectively present remote site visibility with threshold alerting, dashboards and scheduled reports.
Integration Options
CenterScape portal can present sensor data through Modbus and Bacnet slave configurations. RFCode sensor data can also be integrated into other DCIM platforms such as Modius OpenData.
CenterScape Portal
The CenterScape Portal is a web based GUI for managing the RFCode system, sensors, alert thresholds, database schema, RF Gateway connections, Dashboards, Reporting and Maps.
Fast Edge Site Deployment
Deploying an RF Gateway in a remote location is quick and easy:
- Configure the RF Gateway before sending it to site, including the uplink settings in CenterScape
- Ensure there’s a network connection to your CenterScape Portal at the remote site (this could be via the internet, WAN, 4G or 5G)
- The ‘uplink’ back to base configuration enables the RF Gateway to auto connect to the CenterScape Portal once it’s powered up and connected to the network at the remote site.
Pack a range of RFCode sensors and a site diagram (using a tool like Visio showing where the sensors are to be deployed) with the RF Gateway before shipping to the remote site. Use the same diagram as a Map background in CenterScape to view your remote site sensor data as soon as the RF Gateway connects to the CenterScape Portal.
Why use Wireless Sensors
Designed to enable fast, secure deployment, sensor re-use or reallocation, and simple remote deployment by non data centre experts.
Why Wireless Sensors?
There are a number of benefits of using wireless sensors:
- fast to deploy
- can be deployed in difficult to reach locations
- can be easily redeployed to locations where you need visibility
- obviously they don’t require time to wire them in, but it also means they don’t require network ports
- come online in the CenterScape Portal as soon as they’re in range of an RF Gateway
- enables the same RF Gateways to deliver environmental sensor data as well as (fixed and mobile) asset location information.
Sensor Reallocation - when would you do it?
One of the key benefits of wireless sensors is they can be easily moved from one location to another and to report the status of different items or infrastructure. For example:
- retiring / replacing an asset and reallocating the asset sensor tag to the new device
- moving temperature and humidity sensors to different IT racks to determine and/or monitor perceived hot spots in a data centre
- one or more environmental sensor needs to be moved to another data centre
- the data centre is upgraded or replaced – so don’t throw away the sensors – reallocate and reuse them across your new facility
- you’ve moved to a colocation data centre – move your RFCode sensors with your RF Gateway to your racks in the colo facility and get your own view of cooling and humidity supplied to the front of your racks.
Wireless data flows
How does wireless sensor data end up in the CenterScape Portal? It’s quite a secure process:
- RFCode sensors only transmit their ID and the payload using RFCode’s proprietary protocol at 433MHz
- RFCode sensors don’t have wireless receivers so the sensors can’t be used as an entry point to a device or network
- The RFCode sensor ID must already be registered in CenterScape for the sensor to be recognised
- RF Gateways are wireless receive-only (no wireless transmitter is included) at 433MHz, which receive sensor transmissions (ID and payload) that are in range, then send the sensor data over a secure connection to CenterScape
- Note – the RF Gateways have be registered and authenticated in CenterScape
- Assuming the sensor data received by CenterScape is in the correct numeric format for a registered sensor the relative payload data is interpreted and stored in CenterScape
No data or traffic is sent from CenterScape via an RF Gateway to an RFCode sensor. The traffic is strictly one way from sensor to CenterScape.
Wireless Sensor Battery Life & Replacement
Not all sensors can have their batteries replaced. In particular, ruggedised sensors are permanently sealed and are discarded when the battery expires. CenterScape alerts and reports sensors with low battery indicators.
For sensors that can have batteries replaced, a simple battery replacement process can see a battery replaced in less than a minute. Batteries are commonly sourced and are not proprietary.
RFCode & Secure Connectivity
Maintaining secure networking and connectivity between your Edge, HPC, Modular or colocation facility RFCode monitoring solution can be achieved in many ways.
SSL - RF Gateways to CenterScape
RF Gateways should be configured to use SSL to connect to the CenterScape Portal.
- By default, HTTP and HTTPS will use ports 6580 and 6581 respectively. However, these can be changed if necessary.
- By default SSL is enabled (default HTTPS port 6581 is listening) with a self-signed SSL certificate.
- Steps for configuring a CA-signed SSL certificate can be found in the Configuring SSL Certificates for use with RF Code Readers section of the User Manual.
How Much Data is Transmitted?
Fixed RF Gateways can each support 1000’s of in-range sensors. Each sensor only sends it’s ID and payload to CenterScape. Sensors typically broadcast their status every 10 seconds, but because each message is so short, each tag has an actual transmission time of less than 10 seconds per day.
- Sensors typically broadcast their status every 10 seconds, but because each message is so short, each tag has an actual transmission time of less than 10 seconds per day (this also helps sustain long battery life of typically 5-7 years with a 10-second beacon rate).
- To conserve battery power, sensors remain in sleep mode 99.99% of the time; every 10 seconds, the sensor will wake-up and broadcast an extremely short status message before going back to sleep.
- Each sensors’ RF message includes its unique ID number and a short status indication (e.g., normal, location, sensor status and/or low battery condition).
Wireless WAN (3G / 4G / 5G)
Remote site RF Gateways can securely deliver (in range) wireless sensor’s data to the CenterScape Portal using 3G/4G/5G enabled routers and/or firewalls. Contact Oper8 to find out how.
Internet & Internet VPN
Remote site RF Gateways can securely deliver (in range) wireless sensor’s data to the CenterScape Portal using Internet and Internet VPN connectivity.
Is RFCode a DCIM Solution?
The RFCode CenterScape solution with wireless sensors is complementary to a DCIM solution such as Modius OpenData. Whereas Modius and many other DCIM solutions do not include wireless environmental and asset tracking capabilities, RFCode sensor data can be integrated into a number of DCIM solutions including Modius OpenData.
Is RFCode an IoT Solution?
Depending on how you might define IoT, we regard the RFCode Solution an IoT Solution that presents environmental and asset tracking payload data from distributed sites and devices via remote gateways to a centralised platform.
Only the sensor ID and payload is sent across the network to the CenterScape Portal where it is CenterScape’s job to map the sensor to it’s interpreted meaning and determine the criticality of the payload data, just like any other IoT system.
