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Financial Consortium Publishes RFID Standards for IT Assets
The overall goal of the FSTC's efforts is to provide the financial industry and the IT asset suppliers with a common set of tools and a standard format for utilizing RFID to identify IT assets, regardless of which bank has ordered a particular asset.
Many IT asset suppliers that serve banks are already members of EPCglobal, Fricke says. Those that are not, he notes, will need to become members in order to be assigned a company prefix that is part of the numbering scheme (this allows the unique identifier assigned to each asset to trace back to its manufacturer). According to Fricke, EPCglobal is offering discounted membership fees to these firms as an incentive.
One of the newly released documents—"FSTC RFID Basic Functional Requirements—Data Center Asset Tracking"—calls for the EPC Gen 2 passive tags to be pre-encoded and applied by the manufacturer, then attached to the front face of the asset so it can be easily seen. The labels must include a human-readable version of the identifier and a one-dimensional bar code of the number, as well as a 2-D bar code, if space permits. The tag must be readable from a distance of 3 feet using a handheld interrogator, and from 6 feet with a fixed-position reader.
The document also calls for manufacturers to begin integrating the RFID tags into the IT asset chassis "in a ruggedized, tamper-proof fashion," though it does not specify when this is expected to take effect, nor does it provide any other details regarding this transition.
Fricke hopes other industries that maintain data centers will adopt this framework for tracking assets as well. "Any company that has a data center that wants to keep up with their assets," he states, "can use this to speed up the process of inventory and tracking."
Many IT asset suppliers that serve banks are already members of EPCglobal, Fricke says. Those that are not, he notes, will need to become members in order to be assigned a company prefix that is part of the numbering scheme (this allows the unique identifier assigned to each asset to trace back to its manufacturer). According to Fricke, EPCglobal is offering discounted membership fees to these firms as an incentive.
One of the newly released documents—"FSTC RFID Basic Functional Requirements—Data Center Asset Tracking"—calls for the EPC Gen 2 passive tags to be pre-encoded and applied by the manufacturer, then attached to the front face of the asset so it can be easily seen. The labels must include a human-readable version of the identifier and a one-dimensional bar code of the number, as well as a 2-D bar code, if space permits. The tag must be readable from a distance of 3 feet using a handheld interrogator, and from 6 feet with a fixed-position reader.
Fricke hopes other industries that maintain data centers will adopt this framework for tracking assets as well. "Any company that has a data center that wants to keep up with their assets," he states, "can use this to speed up the process of inventory and tracking."
