Jerry Lyons says bring on hurricane-force winds, smoke and gas, explosions, high-pressure water, leaking water pipes or a disgruntled employee: His modular structures can take them.
Lyons, 49, is the idea man behind iFortress in West Paterson, designers and developers of metal-based assembled panels used to build multimillion-dollar computer data centers, the heart of a company’s computing and telecommunications operations.
“We needed to create this technology that was comprehensive and [could withstand] multiple threats,” said Lyons, such as fire, rain and smoke.
Since the company was formed in 2001, Lyons has been designing and testing panels that, when assembled as a room, would protect the equipment against a collapsing roof, water-pipe bursts, gas, fire and wind.
He came up with the idea while he was setting up stock-trading desks in Manhattan in 1999 when he realized everyone’s job depended on computers often housed in a building’s most vulnerable places: basements, closets, under bathrooms and kitchens, where plumbing and fires occur, or against exterior walls.
Lyons talked to his trading customers about their companies’ data centers and discovered that events such as leaking toilets caused extensive computer damage and downtime losses. He also found other weak points in the construction of data centers: light switches that let in smoke and gas from a fire; dry wall that could be cut through.
Data centers use high-tech devices such as advanced retinal scanners, backup generators and digital firewalls to safeguard and protect the critical equipment inside. Lyons believed the center designers overlooked the outer structure.
To describe what iFortress has developed, Lyons trademarked the phrase “structural security” to market his modular panel structures and took his idea to company executives and data center designers.
“It’d be the ‘Aha!’ factor,” said Lyons, “like we invented shoes when the whole world was barefoot.”
Lyons’ timing…