When power goes down, HdS lights up

HdS' Pete Middelplaats, right, is part of the team helping CablePrice IT manager Tony Gordon protect its data.

Global moves to tighten corporate governance and improve homeland security are a headache for many businesses but a boon for data management company Hosting and Datacentre Services (HdS).

Terror attacks, the aftermath of corporate fiascos such as Enron's and even hard lessons learned from central Auckland's crippling power outage in the 90s have fuelled a re-think of companies' disaster recovery strategies, says HdS executive director Roger Cockayne.

The traditional plan of regularly saving files to tape, storing those tapes off-site and retrieving them if catastrophe strikes proved ineffective when the lights went out in Auckland's CBD because large numbers of staff were suddenly working from home without access to backup records.

"[Working from home] is becoming the business continuity plan that's coming out now quite strongly in Europe and the States," Cockayne says. "All they [companies] want to do is give people access from anywhere into the systems they need."

Among its data management armoury, HdS has an automated "backup-over-wire" system it is touting as the first of its type available in New Zealand.

The system, implemented by commercial vehicle distributor CablePrice and roading authority Transit NZ, allows information stored at HdS' data centres to be retrieved from anywhere on a wide area network.

"The beauty of backup over wire is that ethernet backup is a cheap way to move data between a remote site and the company's wide area network," says CablePrice IT manager Tony Gordon.

"With the number of outlying branch offices, we weren't maintaining our backups and restores as we would have liked to. The logistics of removing tapes off-site and recovery were giving us headaches, and there was little visibility of the location and management of data."

The company investigated building its own remote data recovery site but ruled that out because of the cost.

HdS business development manager Pete Middelplaats said IT managers continue to be concerned about the effectiveness of their companies' backup systems. Outsourcing was becoming increasingly popular because of the cost and expertise required to develop an effective solution in-house.

Cockayne said the company's backup-over-wire application was an example of HdS' focus on development and innovation, which was vital to keep the business viable against larger competitors in the IT services provision market, such as EDS and Unisys.

HdS was formed in 2002 following a management buyout of Hitachi Data Systems New Zealand by Cockayne and fellow executive Wayne Norrie. They own 51 per cent of the business, and Hitachi has retained a 49 per cent stake.

The company employs just over 50 staff in Auckland, Wellington and Brisbane and has two data centres in New Zealand and five in Australia. Its Wellington facility is a $10 million, 460sq m purpose-built centre in Tawa that opened last year.

"Data centres aren't just an armoured building," Cockayne says. "It's all the disciplines that go inside: the change management, problem management, performance management, capacity management, systems management."

HdS' plans for the next 18 months included pursuing what it has labelled "Project DataCloud".

The first phase of DataCloud, the backup-over-wire application, is to be followed by another simple backup and restore solution, which the company plans to release soon.

The next stage of the company's development would be a push into more advanced storage management offerings. With laws and codes of practice increasingly prescribing how long data needs to be saved, HdS is developing tools to coordinate the retention of different types of company records in approved formats for prescribed periods of time.

"We're working very strongly towards that complete governance of records over the wire," Cockayne says.

Hosting and Datacentre Services (HdS)

* Who: Executive director Roger Cockayne.
* Where: Offices in Auckland, Wellington and Brisbane. Data centres in Auckland, Wellington, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
* What: Data management and hosting.
* Why: "We're quite unique in that we've got a heritage of looking after people's data [through Hitachi] and we've never lost anybody's data. That's something we can stand by."