Vast, Detailed, and Flexible: The New Falcon FMS
Penny Wealth (There’s A Point To This, We Promise)
Here’s a little exercise that you’ve probably come across before:
Take a penny.
Double it.
What do you have? Two cents, of course. Now double that two cents. What do you get? Four cents. (Exciting, right?)
But here’s the beauty of it: keeping on doubling what you’ve got everyday and in a month’s time you’ll have gone from a single penny to more than 10 million dollars.
Which, for most people, is not an amount to sneeze at.
(Unless you’re allergic to that special ink they use to print money).
But what are we getting at here? Well, this fun little financial exercise is a great metaphor for one of the major upgrades headlining the launch of the third generation of RLE Technologies’ Falcon Facilities Monitoring System (FMS).
(No, we haven’t recast everything in copper and no, it doesn’t cost a million dollars. Be patient.)
First, As Always, A Little History
Falcon Monitoring Systems have been lauded as the best of their class for years. With our determination to do things right and our infrastructional agility, we’ve never been content to rest on our laurels – at RLE we’re always looking for ways to improve and grow.
Our Falcon line of monitoring systems has a cornerstone – the Facilities Monitoring System, aka the FMS – and it’s got some snappy new features. With its ability to not only monitor versatile feeds and sensors but also to trip the right alarms and send out the right notifications to the right people, the FMS’s vigilant eye has saved more than one data center from crisis and the inevitable downtime that follows.
And now the keenness of that eye has sharpened.
A Whole Eyrie Of Falcons
The first major change in the re-launched FMS is its greatly expanded capacity for nesting. (Pay attention, folks – this is where the pennies come in).
So you take one FMS unit. By itself it has the ability to monitor up to 2000 virtual points (another upgrade new to this incarnation; its individual monitoring capacity used to hover somewhere around 600 points). Nice, right?
But this one FMS now has the ability to receive feeds from up to 32 other FMS units.
Yeah. 32.
And each of those 32 FMSs also has the ability to monitor 32 other FMSs.
And each of those 1024 FMSs can receive data from up to 32 other FMSs.
Not unlike the pennies, that number continues to increase exponentially, until pretty soon you’ve got a huge number of very sharp eyes monitoring the vast array of your facilities for the slightest fluctuation indicating danger.
And you can sit comfortably and monitor it all from one FMS situated, well, wherever you’d like. Thanks to the FMS’s web-enabled reporting system, an alert from even the most distant outpost travels to the main almost instantaneously.
A whole cast of keen-eyed, telepathic Falcons, keeping an eye on your interests.
Not bad, eh?
Seeing What The Falcon Sees
With such an expansion of possibilities also comes the need for more detailed oversight. It’s not enough to know something’s gone wrong somewhere, you need to know what and exactly where. That’s where the second main upgrade of the new FMS comes into play.
The new unit comes with an embedded firmware mapping feature that allows you to drill down to specific monitoring points by means of an easy-to-use graphic on the main monitor.
This can be geographic, pictographic, hieroglyphic, whatever you like. You can use the provided icons or upload your own image. However you set it up, when an alarm sounds, you can quickly zoom into which sensor is alerting in which location.
And did you notice that we said “you set it up”? This system is entirely user friendly and easy to configure without the need for a programmer or other coding expert.
Friendly Falcons
While the actual bird is known more for its predatory instincts than its willingness to get along with others, the reverse is true of the FMS. The whole thing is designed to be quick, agile, and simple in its set-up.
The newest version might just be the most flexible version yet. In addition to that lovely new mapping feature, the FMS is third-party friendly and vendor neutral. This mean it has the ability to tie in sensors from any vendor or system you’re already using: hard-wired sensors, digital inputs, network connections, all with no workarounds required. If a piece of equipment comes with its own internal data storage, the FMS can read it via different protocols – the FMS can just as easily receive third-party input as it can data from one of RLE’s own sensors.
And since each and every FMS has these new capabilities, you can link the units together to access the benefits of nesting and interconnected mapping across an entire FMS network.
The newest version of the FMS firmware is backwards compatible. If your FMS has a ColdFire processor, you can download the newest version of firmware from our website and upgrade your unit so it sports all the latest and greatest features.
If your FMS is an older unit that doesn’t have a ColdFire processor, we offer kits that help you bring your FMS into the 21st Century. If you want to upgrade from a previous generation, we make the transition quick and easy. No muss, no fuss. (Except, possibly some dust, depending on how often you pull out the Pledge).
Soaring High
There are other upgrades to this FMS unit: increased processing power, expanded memory, better security via encrypted SNMP V3 (optional).
But the new wingspan and drill-down mapping feature are particularly exciting because, in the words of RLE owner Don Raymond, “No one offers these robust features and this type of scalable system at this price point. Protecting facilities from disaster is our business. We work hard to anticipate the needs of our customers, and to develop robust features you can’t find on other similarly-priced systems. We are proud to offer this product, and to be an integral, effective part of so many mission-critical operations.”
Indeed, there are patents pending for both FMS mapping and nesting. In the past, RLE has always been praised for its position within its own weight-class. But the new FMS is ready for a step into a new league.
The FMS has launched and is ready to go. Don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more about RLE Technologies’ FMS and to upgrade your environmental monitoring system today.
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