Netshield South Africa has announced the latest iteration of its Nviromon, the Netshield Nviromon-ULTI-1S, an intelligent IoT-enabled environmental monitoring and control gateway.

The Nviromon-ULTI-1S provides users access to a device that offers full IoT enablement, traditional SNMP manageability, as well as enhanced intelligent features, to support monitoring and management of connected devices / sensors within any monitoring and control environment. This enables a customer to merge and migrate from traditional SNMP managed environments to an industrialised IoT environment.

“This product is an environmental monitoring and control gateway that services today’s phenomenon of collaborative sensing and intelligent control, at the point of presence of the installation,” says Inus Dreckmeyr, CEO at Netshield South Africa. “With its small form factor, taking only 1U rack space, it is easy to add into an existing environment.

“The true benefit of the Nviromon-ULTI-1S is that it is enhanced as an intelligent gateway and is able to control local events, send alerts, as well as relay all events – either singularly or simultaneously, through IoT based or/and SNMP protocols to your IoT/cloud or private networked database-based servers, for storage and big data analysis.”

The new Nviromon-ULTI-1S boasts, among others, enhanced features in five key areas, namely: environmental monitoring, security, fire systems, air conditioning/HVAC and power systems.

The monitoring and control of the HVAC and air conditioning system, can now be done through either a remote IO probe connecting to management contacts, or a protocol conversion probe that connects to the serial interfaces on the device. This removes the various silos created by having independent monitoring solutions for each type of third party device and gives you a holistic view of all systems used in an environment.

Additionally, you can monitor and control HVAC and air conditioning systems, by monitoring air flow and air conditioner power consumption, and share the cooling load of each unit by cycling the aircons. This ensures that they run for the same number of hours and that all units in your environment are serviced. With its load sharing feature it is also able to measure the power that each one consumes.

With improved functionality, more capabilities and connectivity for a larger selection of sensors (up to 150 wired and wireless sensors), the Nviromon-ULTI-1S gives you full monitoring and control of all your environmental monitoring devices, including environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, fire and even flooding detection.

Enhanced security can be evidenced in heightened integration with your access control, the system can monitor and control multiple access doors to environments such as server rooms, highly secure sites and buildings.

The device identifies users through connected access controllers such as biometrics, keypads and RFID, and the integration of IP cameras enables snapshots and recording of events. All of which can be monitored and actioned remotely, remote control is made possible by referencing localised or remote access databases, identifying if the individual has the clearance required to enter the environment.

Another new feature includes fire system monitoring that can now integrate into third party fire panels, but still maintaining the option of adding optional fire detection sensors and optional solid-state suppression technologies. The fire system monitoring system is able to send notifications of alerts and events to centralised monitoring stations.

From a power perspective the device can be linked to UPSs, PDUs, generators, rectifiers, monitored surge protection elements and other alternative power systems, to monitor and read the statuses of these devices, once again relaying alerts and events to centralised monitoring stations.

During a critical communication up-link failure the Nviromon-ULTI-1S makes use of Out-of-Band GSM/LTE (GPRS to 5G) or Lora/Sigfox/NBIoT connectivity technologies, to relay all critical alerts and events, while buffering all events for relaying on recovery of up-link connectivity.

“In the event of an alarm, or an environmentally triggered event within your datacentre, the system will first establish the user-defined severity. This can be set as either critical, major or minor, and react according to the users defined pre-set procedure. Based on the configuration of the system, it can send automated escalating out-of-band messages such as emails and/or SMS’s directly to your IT teams and then escalate alerts based on the failure of receipt acknowledgements,” adds Dreckmeyr.

Today the Nviromon-ULTI-1S integrates with a host of third party systems, however, with the help of Netshield’s special development team, not only is the system being continually developed and improved on, clients can also request bespoke decisions and features for their environment.