Meijer Tests HP's IT Asset-Tracking RFID System

Data generated from the HP asset-tracking solution can be linked into asset-management software, such as that made by Peregrine Systems, which HP acquired last year. According to Brignone, HP Labs is currently developing application program interfaces (APIs) allowing so that end users will be able to link the asset-tracking system to other types of capital-asset inventory systems.

HP has been developing RFID-based, real-time IP asset-tracking systems for several years. In October 2004, the company described one such prototype application—the Smart Rack—that used thermal sensors and high-frequency RFID readers to identify and monitor the temperature of servers sitting in large metal server cabinets (see HP Kicks Off U.S. RFID Demo Center). One reader was mounted on each server cabinet, with 14 separate antennas configured on the server door to read the 13.56 MHz tag attached to each server in the cabinet. There were also five or six thermal sensors, wired to the cabinet door and linked to the reader, to monitor the temperature of the servers in the cabinet.

The readers in the Smart Rack were networked and the collected data was converted into two-dimensional graphics, viewed through a monitor displaying an inventory of the cabinets and a temperature profile of each cabinet, in real time. When networked with portal readers and contactless employee badge cards, the application could indicate, for example, when a server is removed from the server area, and by which employee. Abnormally high temperature readings could also alert IT staff to problems with specific servers.

In 2004, Salil Pradhan, chief technologist for HP's RFID program at that time, said the Smart Rack application would likely be the first RFID research project under development at HP Labs to become a commercial product, possibly by the end of 2005. However, such commercial release never took place.