Top College Server Room protected by Nobel Fire Systems
Based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, Kirklees College is a top 20 college with a staff of approximately 1,200 and 20,000 students including 4,000 full time learners.
As part of its duty of care, the College has a responsibility to ensure that student’s files saved on the College servers remain safe in a protected and secure environment. So too with all College files and those of the many ‘commercial’ organisations using the Kirklees data facilities.
A key aspect of this relates to fire protection where even a small fire in a server room can have far reaching and expensive consequences. Loss of data would badly disrupt the day to day workings of the College and would clearly impact on its bottom line performance – not to mention the physical and emotional effect it would have on the students.
Recommended by Professional Fire Systems of Yorkshire, and as part of the overall fire protection work being carried out within the College, Nobel Fire Systems were called in to specifically protect the College’s critically important server room. Nobel is regarded as one of the leading providers of fire suppression systems for the data industry and focus entirely on special risk environments.
From the original consultation and site survey, Nobel recommended, designed and installed an IG541 gaseous fire suppression system. The IG541 system was selected for a number of reasons. An important factor relates to the fact that it’s an environmentally friendly system that is safe for use in normally occupied areas, presenting little risk to occupants if they were to be in the room at the time of discharge. In the College environment this could be an important issue. Critically inert gases are also totally clean so there is no risk to the equipment or data it is being used to protect.
Additionally multiple access and egress points are controlled with remote status and indication units of the fire systems condition with High sensitivity smoke detection equipment employed for the very early detection of any smoke in the room, which is linked to the ‘house’ alarm through the main alarm interface.