Member Article

Aspire’s Nigel raises the roof

A LEADING north east businessman was struggling to find a company with the right qualifications to put a specialist roof on his latest expansion – so he took a course and built it himself.

Nigel Begg, Managing Director at IT specialists Aspire TS, said he wanted to ensure the work on his £1.2m, 3,500 sq ft datacentre stayed in the region: “The project is really important to the future of the business, but we still wanted the work to go to north east firms.

“However, the architect wanted a very high-spec roof on the datacentre and the nearest firm with the requisite skills was in the south of England. The roof had to be both highly secure and eco-friendly, and the roofing system specified by the architect had to look good too.

“I was also very interested in the construction process so I thought, ‘you know what, I’ll do it myself.”

So Nigel took a couple of the local contractors working on the project with him and the three travelled to Wales and spent two days on a Tata-Steel approved installation course.

“We were based in a huge steelworks that had a roof set-up a couple of metres off the ground,” he explained.

Nigel returned to Aspire’s Heworth Hall HQ with the necessary skills and spent weekends and spare hours over a fortnight completing the datacentre roof.

“I enjoyed the work, and I now know the building far better than I would have otherwise. The datacentre will give our customers greater flexibility and assurance and I like to think the episode shows exactly what we will do to improve our service to customers.

“The datacentre will take us to the next level in terms of what we can offer our customers. It will be categorised as Tier 3, which is one of the most stringent datacentre ratings offering the highest levels of resilience, security and 99.98% availability.

One of the first companies to benefit from the new datacentre , when it opens in the new year, will be leading Teesside firm of solicitors QualitySolicitors Punch Robson, which has offices in central Middlesbrough, Ingleby Barwick and Coulby Newham.

IT Manager, Chris Caley said: “Protecting company data is absolutely vital for the security and stability of any business and having the right ICT partner is crucial.

“We consider data security and availability to be of the utmost importance and recognise that the datacentre will ensure our business continues to enjoy the highest levels of resilience, security and connectivity and are delighted to be working with Aspire.

Chris Fraser, Technical Director of Aspire, added: “The datacentre will be among the most energy efficient in Europe, using revolutionary evaporative cooling technologies rather than traditional refrigeration which results in greatly reduced electricity consumption for all IT equipment and servers. This in turn reduces operational costs which can then be passed on to our customers.

“We already have presence in five data centres across the UK, all of which we will retain moving forward. It’s important to point out that the new facility is not about replacing existing space; it’s about further expanding our business and meeting demand.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section