Eighty-six percent of 300 U.S. companies surveyed plan to expand their data centers in the next year. The average expansion has increased by 50 percent to 15,000 square feet in 2008 from 10,000 square feet in 2007, due primarily to disaster recovery and the federal Sarbanes-Oxley law that requires extensive filing of financial records.

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 is on the mark. The data center world is undergoing a major expansion, according to Digital Realty Trust Inc., which owns and manages corporate and Internet data centers internationally.

The company reported this spring that 86 percent of 300 U.S. companies surveyed plan to expand their data centers in the next year. The size planned this year for an average expansion has increased by 50 percent to 15,000 square feet in 2008 from 10,000 square feet in 2007, according to the survey, due primarily to disaster recovery and the federal Sarbanes-Oxley law that requires extensive filing of financial records.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency also is tracking the growth of the centers, and particularly the energy they use. In August 2007, the agency reported a surge in the market as the financial services, health-care and retail industries shifted operations to computers and the Internet.

Lyons attributes his entrepreneurial "drive" to his great- grandfather, who founded a construction company in New York City and to his father who was in the printing business.

His arc of careers has twisted and turned, starting from child psychology and working with juveniles in a maximum security prison in Connecticut, to buying and selling a florist business, to selling furniture.

After self-funding the roots of iFortress, Lyons ran out of money around 2001 during a fire test on a panel. He turned to old friends Jack Pero, Jack's brother Banc and Joe Careri for capital, who now help run the company. The group formed what became iFortress.

Since then, iFortress has spent its time in product development, materials testing and market research after partnering with an engineering firm to help design the modular panel systems.

"I believed in it, and the opportunity and challenge was coming up with the technology," said Lyons.

The 8- to 12-foot-tall panels have passed the toughest materials testing developed by the international standards organization, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) for fire, water, weight, wind and bend, which tests for earthquakes.