If a facility has a dedicated room for Information Technology Equipment (ITE), that room is an IT room [645.2]. While the glass-walled room filled with racks is the iconic version, an IT room can be a cement-walled cave in the basement. Nor does the room need to be a dedicated space for IT purposes only.
The key characteristic is it’s a room within the IT equipment area and it contains the IT equipment. On the flip side, an office space with rows of cubicles each equipped with a computer workstation isn’t an IT room.
You can think of an IT room as an onsite mini data center. It serves some critical function (e.g., payroll processing or website hosting), so it’s walled off from the rest of the facility and has limited access. Two common characteristics:
- Automatically locking doors. These could inadvertently lock you in.
- Dedicated fire suppression system. When the fire alarm goes off, exit immediately. There should be a short delay for this purpose, after which a sprinkler system (electrocution hazard) or gas or chemical system (suffocation hazard) kicks in.
