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| EMC's Mallick |
About 25 customers of storage giant EMC Corp were data-recovery ready and they managed to successfully recover their data, said Mallick Pushpasish, EMC South Asia director for Integrated Marketing and Sales Support.
"They had (data) backup systems in New Jersey...and some as far as Texas," Mallick said. He declined to reveal their identities.
He was speaking at the sidelines of EMC's Symmetrix 8000 series of enterprise storage servers launch today.
"Salvaging your data is one thing but that doesn't translate to business continuance," said one industry analyst.
Business continuance is the ability of companies' IT operations to continue to operate as per normal despite any catastrophe or adverse situation, he said.
"Yes, it (business continuance) depends on the infrastructure the companies have...most of our 25 customers were back online well within 24 hours," EMC's Mallick said.
An IBM Singapore spokesperson declined to comment on its World Trade Center customers.
Financial services firm Morgan Stanley, with 3,700 employees working in the south World Trade Center tower, is one company that must deal with Tuesday's collapse of the buildings.
Redundant computer systems--which kick in when the main systems go down--worked as planned and no client or trade information was lost, according to a company memo seen by CNET News.com.
Businesses affected by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center have been turning to disaster-recovery companies in an effort to get their operations back online.
"The first call came in at 9:05 (a.m. US) Eastern time," just a few minutes after the first plane struck the north tower of the 110-story World Trade Center on Tuesday, Comdisco spokesman Rich Maganini said Wednesday. "The calls came in almost one after the other right after that."
"By midday, we had 25 disaster declarations. We are currently supporting 35 customers, many of which either had operations in the World Trade Center or in nearby buildings," Maganini said. So far, 30 of those companies--the "vast majority" in New York but some affected by evacuations in Chicago's Sears Tower and elsewhere--have begun using 13 Comdisco computing facilities, he said.
Disaster-recovery companies such as Comdisco specialize in helping customers prepare for cataclysmic events like floods, fires, earthquakes, wars--or terrorist attacks. They offer clients basic services such as room to bring backup data and set up operations to more sophisticated and expensive "mirroring" in which remote computers simultaneously run the same operations as a company's primary computers.
SunGard, a competitor that is attempting to acquire Comdisco, also has begun working with affected customers, with about 750 employees dealing with consequences of Tuesday's attacks. Fourteen of SunGard's customers have declared a disaster and 68 more are on alert, said Dave Palermo, vice president of marketing. SunGard offers everything from mainframes to offices with PCs and phones.
"At about 8:54 (a.m. US EDT Tuesday), just minutes after the first plane hit, our crisis team began calling customers in the financial district," Palermo said. "Some people are in our facilities now, and some are trying to make their way out of the city to get there."
While the human tragedy of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon is staggering, from a computing perspective there have been more devastating disasters. With Hurricane Floyd in 1999, 26 companies had to declare a disaster.
SunGard has 26 facilities around the country with more than a million square feet of floor space. It has desktop computers ready to go, but through agreements with PC manufacturers the company can quickly have thousands more delivered, Palermo said. "We're nowhere near capacity at this point," he said.
Consulting firm EDS also is helping about a dozen companies deal with the attack, including a financial services company whose operations are being moved to New Jersey, said Rebecca Whitener, director of security and privacy services.
According to the International Data Corp, backup and recovery software vendors reported US$2.7 billion in revenues last year, and this is expected to grow to US$4.7 billion in 2005.
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