Duplicates stored in subterranean vault

Press, 11 February 1986, Page 29

Duplicates stored in subterranean vault

By

Peter Coy

Associated Press

NZPA-AP New York Disasters that wipe out computers can wreak havoc on a company’s business, so specialised firms are starting up to store company records and provide back-up computers in case of emergency.

One company is building a storage vault 30 metres beneath the streets of Manhattan’s financial district, a one-hectare

chamber dug from bedrock. The man-made cavern is under the World Trade Centre in New York. It has a guard station with machine-gun-proof glass, halon gas for extinguishing fires and 14 closedcircuit TV cameras for surveillance.

Dataport would be a safe place for diamonds, rubies or gold bullion. Instead it will contain nothing but thousands of reels of magnetic tape — in effect, duplicates of the records of corporations. Dataport and other storehouses across the United States cater to their clients’ growing nervousness about their dependence on computers vulnerable to fire, flood, sabotage, theft or simple human error.

Experts say a total computer wipe-out with no back-up plan in place — an unlikely event — might permanently cripple a business like a bank or brokerage firm. “A computer failure is probably the single most tragic business event that could happen to a company. You can’t move product, you can’t collect money, you can’t ship, you can’t collect premiums. You just can’t function,” said Mr John Ratliff, the vice-president of marketing for Sungard Services Co.

In spite of the danger, no more than 1000 of the roughly 14,000 data centres in the United States and Canada that use IBM mainframes of the 4300 series or bigger, have disaster plans that include off-site back-up computers, according to Mr Ray Hipp, president of Comdisco Data Recovery Services Inc. Executives are reluctant to divert large sums of money from pressing needs to guard against a disaster that may never happen, according to Comdisco and Sungard, which are first and second, respectively, in the business of supplying back-up computers.

Companies, like New York’s Dataport, store back-up copies of a company’s computer records. The client company can retrieve the magnetic tapes on short notice and load them into its computers to replace ones that have been damaged. Unfortunately, a diaster that destroys data often destroys machines as well. Comdisco, Sungard and other companies charge clients a big fee for the right to use spare computers that they keep ready and waiting at “hot sites.”

For those who cannot afford a hot site there is the "cold site,” a room

equipped with electricity and phone lines, ready to have a computer installed in an emergency. Comdisco charges its biggest clients up to SUS2O,OOO ($NZ38,600) a month for access to a big IBM mainframe and a variety of peripheral equipment, Mr Hipp said. Computer makers like IBM and Digital Equipment also offer rescue services, such as rush shipment of replacement computers and consulting by their in-house disaster experts.

The New York Stock Exchange relies on 13 computers to support floor trading. Three could fail in a way that would bring trading to a halt, said Don Dueweke, the exchange’s

senior vice president of market operations.

Sometimes a small failure serves to remind companies of how serious a big failure would be. At the New York Stock Exchange, for example, a problem occasionally will cause trading to halt for 15 minutes or half an hour.

All the exchange’s computers now are in one secure section of a building just off Wall Street, but Dueweke said it plans to split the machines between two sites to lessen the chance of an incapacitating disaster. Like other big New York computer users the stock exchange pays a fee to a centre in neighbouring New Jersey that main-

tains back-up computers it can use on a moment’s notice, and it stores backup records in a commercial storehouse in upstate New York.

The first data-storage centres, built in the 1950 s and 1960 s out of fear of a Soviet nuclear attack, tended to be in mountain strongholds far from cities. Records were rotated at the leisurely pace of once a month.

The newer centres, like Dataport, tend to be more convenient. Records are shipped in and out as often as several times a day, ensuring that a disaster would not punch a hole in a company’s data records of more than a few hours.