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ZeroNines Press Coverage
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New industry develops out of companies' fears
Businesses demand data storage in case of an emergency
By Steve Caulk, Rocky Mountain News
September 1, 2002
Companies concerned about terrorist attacks, earthquakes, floods and other disasters have prompted the creation of a new industry.
Firms such as Denver-based Inflow, which offers data storage and management services, have seen a significant increase in demand for backup systems during the last year.
And insurance companies are demanding to see details of "business continuance" plans before offering policies, said Craig McLellan, manager of business continuance services at Inflow.
In other words, if a company loses its computer servers - with all the company's critical customer data
- in some kind of disaster, what happens next? Can the company survive?
It can if it has that data duplicated and stored in another location, ready for immediate application.
About 80 percent of the customers at Denver-based ViaWest Internet Services have expressed interest this year in establishing a "business continuance" or "disaster recovery" plan, said Steve Prather, vice president of network service for the Web hosting company.
And about 10 percent of Inflow's revenues are directly attributable to its business continuance services - up from zero a year ago, said Jim McHose, executive vice president of corporate development at Inflow.
Some customers at Inflow had already been using the company as a "hot" site - where the customer can immediately replace an out-of-commission system - without consulting with Inflow. Of all the customers at Inflow using the services for business continuance, about half are "hot" sites, about 30 percent are "warm" sites, which provide recovery within 24 hours. The rest are "cold" sites (recovery within 72 hours), McLellan said.
"Clearly the events of last year increased companies' awareness," he said.
Inflow, which has 700 customers in 12 markets, spent the last 60 days talking to its top 70 customers and discovered that they are most concerned about ways to make or save money and ways to ensure continuation of operations under adverse conditions, McHose said.
Inflow believes it is in a particularly good position to address those concerns because most of its data centers are outside the largest metropolitan areas. Inflow has centers in such cities as Denver, Minneapolis, San Diego and Phoenix, which are less likely terrorist targets.
"Customers don't want to rely on a tier-one city as their hot site," McLellan said.
Inflow is testing a technology that archives an "image" of the customers' operating systems, in hopes of further accelerating recovery time.
"When you recover a server, the longest part is getting that operating system back up and running," she said. "If you have 1,000 servers, that takes a lot of bodies, loading CDs. It takes people time. It's not all automated. Backup tools don't back up and recover operating systems. By archiving the image and allowing those images to be downloaded over the network, you can recover quicker and roll out a new server. So that's different, and it makes an interesting offering."
Terrorism and natural disasters aren't the only concerns on the minds of customers, said Wendy St. Clair, spokeswoman for ViaWest. They also want backup for telecommunications companies on the verge of going out of business.
"We're getting customers who have a server in Colorado, and they want a redundant one in Utah," she said.
Some companies back up their data files at the end of the day and ship them to another city. But that doesn't address the problem of all the data that a company might lose between backups, said Inflow's McLellan. And a company could easily find itself out of business for a couple of days while it retrieves the information, he said.
"The issue is to reduce that window of recovery time," he said.
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