A wireless monitoring system for servers beat out six other inventions to win the Open Compute Project’s first hackathon for hardware, held at last week’s Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. The Open Compute Project just added a post to its blog about the news.
I wrote about the hackathon, while my colleagues Stacey Higginbotham and Derrick Harris reported on other news from the conference.
In today’s post, one coordinator of the hackathon, Zak Homuth, CEO of Upverter, provides details on the seven competitors, from a strip of temperature sensors for server racks to a rack that accommodates Open Compute servers and legacy servers.
The post also names the winning hack, a transmitter that plugs into an Open Compute server debug port and sends information to a server rack’s aggregation point, which can then send the information to the data center’s management framework. The device can also have an LED.
The four inventors of the device call it Project Cheesy Fingers, they told me last week. The coinage is a nod to the real life of a data center employee, who has cheesy fingers on one hand and a beer in the other one when he or she spots a technical problem. The device helps the employee determine if the problem is worth getting out of the chair.
One of the transmitter’s inventors, Prof. Andrew Cencini of Bennington College in Vermont, has written a post about the device.
The Open Compute Project Foundation will support the group’s efforts to patent their invention or build a prototype, Homuth wrote in his post.
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