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Last Wednesday, when Matthew B. Jarmel, principal at Jarmel Kizel, an architecture firm in Livingston, received a new set of business cards from the printer something was different. These cards signaled a formal goodbye to the 25-year-old firm's earlier name ISS, and a change to a new industry order Jarmel Kizel is going high-tech.
BUSINESS NEWS: What new demands are architects facing today, and what has been the quality of their response?
Jarmel: There is great demand for designing hightech space. In a lot of older buildings, there is demand for high-tech space that might be defined as data centers. We have done a lot of data center work for financial companies like Bear Stearns in Whippany and insurance firm AIG in Livingston. We see this sort of demand also from banks, financial institutions, online trading companies and pharmaceutical companies such as Warner Lambert and Parke-Davis.
BUSINESS NEWS: What challenges does an architect face in designing these high-tech data centers?
Jarmel: The paths of travel for the cabling in the building is an area of great concern. How do you maintain fire ratings as you penetrate floors and walls with the cable? In designing these data centers, you also start to worry about building in redundancies in cooling infrastructure, maybe have extra air conditioning in case one fails, and then you worry about having extra power. Typically the redundancy requirement is anywhere between 50% and 100%. Most people look for 100% redundancy. You typically have uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems that run for between 20 and 40 minutes, and gives...