San Jose’s Cottle Road is the location of the largest IBM campus west of the Mississippi. Built in 1956, making it a historic high-tech site in Silicon Valley, the location’s small town ambiance—complete with peaceful, tree-lined streets, park-like grounds, quiet buildings, even a lake with ducks—seems like the last place in the world for a fire emergency. But Greg McCabe, IBM’s on-site Fire Marshal, never takes any chances with either people or property. Last year, even though the 500-acre campus hasn’t had a major fire since it opened, McCabe decided he wanted to completely overhaul IBM’s outdated fire life safety system.

“We had an older system installed in the ’70s and ’80s, which included a mix of several manufacturers,” said McCabe. “It was not Y2K-compliant, and it needed to be more technologically intelligent. We have 10,000 employees, over 50 buildings, and approximately five million square feet of manufacturing space, including some onsite chemicals. We have tremendous physical assets, but our primary asset is our people. They deserve the best protection that we can find.”

This June, McCabe’s desire becomes reality, when Ceitronics, under the supervision of project manager Mike Dierickx, completes installation of a system-wide upgrade that provides integrated fire life safety throughout all the campus buildings. The system is monitored by one computer at the IBM network command center on campus. It features a graphical control panel that gives visual information about the status of each of hundreds of fire and smoke detection points on the system. It also relays any change in state, as well as the location of any fire. The console is monitored by fire life safety staff on a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week basis. There is a hotline to the San Jose Fire Department, and a sister console sits in McCabe’s office for backup.

Manufactured by Notifier Corp., the system is known as NOTI-FIRE-NET. It allows the integration of all fire alarm communications into a Local Area Network which reports to one on-site network command center. Signals from the NOTI-FIRE-NET fire alarm panels in each building are brought back to the main computer by fiber optic cable. Trouble on any point registers on the computer in the security building.

NOTI-FIRE-NET is known as an “intelligent” system; it is able to monitor and send alarms for hundreds of individual points, called detectors, on the multi-building campus, making it quick and easy to pinpoint the exact location of a fire. More conventional panels, by contrast, send alarms only by zones, making it much more difficult to discover exactly where a fire has started.

“In one area, we have 200 detectors in one room,” said McCabe. “If a detector causes a problem in the old system, we would have to rummage through 60,000 square feet of space to find which detector is sending a signal. NOTI-FIRE-NET tells you exactly where the detector is.”

Ceitronics, which has been a systems integration contractor to IBM for many years, is also making use of unused fiber optic infrastructure in installing the job. “When we got ready to bid the job, we sat down with IBM’s facility planners, who look at campus-wide connectivity issues and mandate specifications for them,” said Aaron Colton, President of Ceitronics. “We talked with everyone and mapped out a solution using spare fiber circuits. We had to install very little new fiber. It allowed us to give IBM campus-wide utility at a significantly lower price. It was a win for everybody.”

McCabe, along with Ceitronics, chose the NOTI-FIRE-NET system from Notifier as the most “intelligent” system for the IBM campus. Notifer, a subsidiary of Pittway Corporate of Chicago, is the world’s leading manufacturer and distributor of fire and security systems. Notifier’s products include an array of “intelligent” alarm systems that can do everything from monitoring sprinkler systems and analyzing smoke characteristics through thousands of detectors every few seconds, to triggering voice announcements to evacuate affected floors of a building.

“NOTI-FIRE-NET was created as a simple solution to integrate diverse multiple building systems into a unified platform that’s easy and inexpensive to operate,” said project manager Dierickx. “The NOTI-FIRE-NET’s open systems architecture allows it to efficiently connect and integrate unlike panels and systems—regardless of the brand and proprietary language. Present systems and technologies need not be replaced. In the case of IBM, this was important because there were remnants of several older systems, including Larse remote cabinets and Pyrotronics activation circuits, that needed to be connected into the new system.”

Dierickx, who has been with Ceitronics for 11 years, says the evolution of fire life safety systems has really accelerated in the last decade as the systems have grown more microprocessor-based. “Before, we had to run a lot of wiring to perform tasks that you can now do with a computer,” he said. “The conventional system monitored and reported some detection, but certainly not individual points, such as the NOTI-FIRE-NET does.”

McCabe likes NOTI-FIRE-NET’s ability to be custom-tailored to deliver the exact range of protection that is required. “If you have a smoke detector going out of calibration, this system gives you several warnings, and you can do a lot of things to repair it remotely,” he said. “It gives us plenty of warning: ‘I’m going out of calibration. I need maintenance.’”

“If I want to disarm one smoke detector because I have some work going on, I can do that from the command center. I don’t have to worry about a contractor covering up the smoke detector and then forgetting about it.

“You can change the calibration of detectors to be a little more or a little less sensitive. If you have a four-day weekend, for example, you can calibrate a block of smoke detectors to be a little more sensitive, because no employee will be in the building.”

McCabe said that Ceitronics came in with a very competitive bid. “They have a real desire to serve the client and customer within a win/win situation. They have high integrity, and they care about their customers.”

For more information about Notifier or the NOTI-FIRE-NET system, contact Aaron Colton directly at 408-452-5000 or e-mail him at aaron@ceitronics.com, or call J. R. Reynolds of Notifier at 209-737-9145.

Illustrations
1. Fiber Optic and Copper Cable Backbone, IBM Fire Life Safety System

Other Features
1. Newly awarded Ceitronics Projects
2. NOTI-FIRE-NET System Components