Colo5 Buys Jacksonville Facility

Less than a year after opening its doors, Colo5 has acquired its second data center in Jacksonville, Florida, the company said Sunday. Colo5 said it had purchased a 20,000 square foot free-standing data center in Jacksonville to expand its colocation and data recovery services business. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

Colo5 operates a disaster recovery center in a 122,000 square foot former Barnett Bank facility on Spring Park Road in Jacksonville, which came online in September. The facility includes a 30,000 square foot data center and 50 disaster recovery suites. The company said it expects Colo5 expects to complete the buildout of its new facility and begin welcoming new customers within the next three months.

More on Carbonite’s Data Loss

Carbonite CEO Dave Friend e-mailed us with additional information about the company’s recent lawsuit against a vendor, in which the company disclosed that it had lost data belonging to 7,500 customers. Friend didn’t deny that the lawsuit states that Carbonite “lost the backups of over 7,500 customers, but says number of customers who actually lost data - rather than having a snapshot of their data disappear - was much smaller. In the interest of thoroughness, here is Friend’s account of the incident:

The data loss event discussed in the lawsuit happened over a year ago. We do not say this to minimize the matter, but it’s important for your readers to know that we stopped buying the servers that caused the problem a long time ago. This is
not a current problem.

The total number of Carbonite customers who were unable to retrieve their data was 54, not 7,500. Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 2006 and 2007 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don’t lose any data. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as “firmware” in the storage servers. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were
completely restored without incident.

Can Amazon be A Player in Disaster Recovery?

Amazon Web Services today introduced a new pricing model for its EC2 compute-on-demand service, offering customers the ability to reserve large amounts of capacity for future use. The feature, known as Reserved Instances, is the latest in a series of steps by Amazon to make AWS more attractive to enterprise users. In introducing the new pricing, Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr highlighted a particular use case.

“Quite a few customers actually told us … they were interested in using EC2 but needed to make sure that we would have a substantial number of instances available to them at any time in order for them to use EC2 in a DR (Disaster Recovery) scenario,” Jeff writes. “In a scenario like this, you can’t simply hope that your facility has sufficient capacity to accommodate your spot needs; you need to secure a firm resource commitment ahead of time.”

This is an interesting pitch, with implications for Amazon’s data center infrastructure. Here’s why:

Video: Earthquake-Proofing the Data Center

We’ve previously noted the use of seismic isolation technology from WorkSafe Technologies to earthquake-proof data centers for Boeing and customers in Japan. The company’s gear was recently installed in a new data center facility for the city Bellevue, Washington, and Dylan Mason of WorkSafe provided a demonstration of the ISO-Base platforms, which sit under the data center racks and allow them to shift independent of the building during an earthquake, reducing damage. This video runs about 2 minutes, 20 seconds.

For additional video, visit our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Major Expansion for SunGard in Philadelphia

SunGard has opened a new data center at 1500 Spring Garden in Philadelphia.

Disaster recovery specialist SunGard Availability Services has leased 123,000 square feet of space at 1500 Spring Garden in Philadelphia to expand its rapidly-growing data center operations in the city, the company said today. The new data center expands on existing facilities at 401 North Broad Street and 833 Chestnut Street, giving SunGard more than 350,000 square feet of space for its Philadelphia operations.

“The new facility extends SunGard’s position in providing a robust, resilient infrastructure,” said Arjun Moorthy, vice president of infrastructure at SunGard Availability Services. “It is a state-of-the-art data center in terms of systems redundancy, uptime and efficiency. The center also supports best practices in energy efficiency to help advance both SunGard’s and its customers’ sustainability strategies.”

SunGard has invested $25 million in the new site, and has just opened the 19,000 square foot first phase. The facility will be completed in four phases, and upon completion will span an entire floor of the building.

Microsoft, Iron Mountain Team on CloudRecovery

Microsoft (MSFT) has teamed with data protection specialist Iron Mountain to offer an automated cloud storage to customers using its System Center. The solution enables Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager (DPM) to automatically archive data using Cloud Recovery, a new service from Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain.

“Iron Mountain Digital and Microsoft are uniquely qualified to help customers manage and protect their data,” said John Clancy, president of Iron Mountain Digital. “Our strategic relationship with Microsoft combines their strengths in platforms and applications with Iron Mountain’s strengths in enterprise storage-as-a-service and disaster recovery - delivering customers a more cost-effective backup and archiving solution from vendors they can trust.”

Digital Health Records Drive Omaha Project

Partnerships between hospitals and data center providers are emerging as a formula for growth in the midwest. In the latest example of this trend, Alegent Health is partnering with CoSentry to build a 48,000 square foot data center on its campus in Omaha to store digital health records. CoSentry, an Omaha-based disaster recovery specialist, will build the facility and use half the space for its clients.

The structure of the partnership is similar to one between TEAM Companies and Iowa Health System, who are jointly building a 46,000 square foot data center in Waukee, Iowa. This approach provides new mission-critical space space for hospitals to store electronic health records, as well as expansion space for the data center partner.

Bastionhost Buys Nova Scotia Data Bunker

IT start-up Bastionhost has purchased an former government continuity bunker in Nova Scotia as part of its plan to build a “Dataville” of data centers in the province. Bastionhost today announced a deal with the Colchester Regional Development Agency (CoRDA) to buy properties on the outskirts of Truro, Nova Scotia to serve as the nucleus of the planned network of facilities.

The properties include a 64,000 square foot former government continuity headquarters bunker known as a “Diefenbunker” because it was built during the era of then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. The facility, which was built to withstand an atomic blast and protect occupants from nuclear fallout is one of a network of six Diefenbunkers built across Canada.

The 45 year-old bunker features geothermal cooling, a sophisticated air filtration system, and redundant backup power engineered to military specifications. The building will house Dataville’s network operations center and provide business continuity and disaster recovery workstations.