AN EXPANDING Hampshire firm is celebrating after its innovative product landed it a prestigious national award.

Aqua Cooling Solutions, based in Fareham, has won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise – the UK’s highest accolade for business success for its Aqua Leak Prevention System (LPS).

The product ensures that computer data centres and server rooms where expensive IT equipment can overheat can benefit from water cooled data cabinets that are guaranteed not to leak when operating.

Benefits of this provides a highly efficient alternative to traditional data centre air cooling meaning less energy costs and minimising the user’s environmental footprint.

The company, based at the Segensworth Business Park, said in some cases this could be by as much as 95 per cent and that as servers become more sophisticated the need for the water cooling option swill increase.

As a result of this innovation the firm received one of 140 Queen’s Awards announced this year for outstanding business achievement in the fields of International Trade, Innovation and Sustainable Development.

Awards are made annually by the Queen.

The innovation has helped to grow the business and the firm’s involvement in the data centre industry.

Sales director Simon Davis, who designed the system, said “Our LPS system has propelled us into the data centre industry and enabled us to grow and develop our business within this market sector, both at home and overseas.”

He said it had also opened up new geographical markets to the business and it was now a manufacturer and exporter to the Middle East, Africa and USA.

“We have gone from employing 30 to 43 people in the past 12 months,” he added.

He said the company had potential orders in the US of more than £20million for the next four to five years as well as major exports to one of China’s biggest companies.

Established in 2001, Aqua also has a satellite office in York and a sister company, QCooling, based in Dallas, USA.