Back up services taking to the cloud

Hawke's Bay's vulnerability to Earthquakes has resulted in extremely secure cloud hosting, says Don Price of Data Hive, which has a latticed network of backups in Hawke's Bay.

Cloud computing is a way of delivering IT services on the internet, that enables businesses to have desktops, software, applications and services over a secure network.

"Fibre tends to be in vulnerable places, like beside highways," he said. "In Hawke's Bay we have three fibre connections - Data Hive uses two of them."

Data Hive has two mirrored centres. One in Napier and the other in Hastings.

He said the building that secured each sever also needed protecting. "For the data centres there are radio links in case there is a local cut. The radio network has a battery backup so if there is an earthquake it will still operate. There is a 15 per cent allowance for the high-speed radio wave's beams of focus - this was developed before Christchurch. The only glitch would be if the power companies can't supply electricity for our customers."

The two servers constantly updated each other and could be accessed retrospectively, he said.

Much of the infrastructure for the protection systems were already in place. Mr Price, a former IBM employee, founded New Zealand's oldest private internet Service Provider, Waspnet, in 1992 when it was known as internet Hawke's Bay.

Mr Price's partner in Data Hive is Wiremu Paipa, who oversees the Hastings centre. "We are a good team. Wiremu uses my network and services and we use his expertise in virtualised software - the cloud," Mr Price said.

Mr Paipa has several businesses operating under the Big Noise Group.

He has been hosting gaming servers since 2000.

He said the Hive was all about security.

"In a nutshell the client gets triple backups of their data. And if the very worse things happen, the client can drive, or swim, down to a centre and we will plug them in to recover their data. We will always be accessible and don't hide behind a phone like some companies," he said.

The Hive was increasingly attracting local business. "We've been flat tack since we had our stand at the Business Expo." Mr Price said the synergy between the partners had kick-started Data Hive to the forefront of the cloud-hosting industry.

He quotes American quality-control guru Dr W. Edwards Deming, whom he once saw at a conference in Guam. "We like to be the dog looking ahead and everyone else sniffing our butts."