Houston Business Journal – September 15, 2006
By Thora Qaddumi

The scene would play well in a James Bond film: Uniformed guards behind bullet-proof windows watch a wall of monitors focused on different areas of the facility. Doors won't open without the right codes and fingerprints. Ten-inch-thick reinforced concrete walls and electrified fences create outside barriers. The roof is engineered to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, and shutters can block 150-mile winds. A slight change in temperature triggers an alarm.

Generators, back-up generators and huge tanks of diesel fuel are safely stored for use in event of power failure. It's the stuff of movies -- and also of off-site data centers. The centers are where companies entrust their data, accessible only to those authorized to get behind the doors and into the individual holding pens where the servers are stored.

There's something more at one of Houston's major data centers operated by CyrusOne -- rooms and suites where some of the city's large international companies have set up off-site business continuity centers that replicate, in miniature, the operations in their own facilities.

"In an emergency, a company can move its personnel to its data center facility and continue operations without missing a beat," says David Ferdman, CyrusOne president and CEO.

Among the companies with facilities at CyrusOne is Dynegy Inc.

"Dynegy's investment in a state-of-the-art business continuity center, physically separated from its downtown Houston headquarters, helps ensure that critical operations are available to meet business demands on an around-the-clock, emergency basis," says Biren Kumar, the energy company's vice president and chief information officer.

The company's business continuity center can be activated instantaneously to maintain the company's critical business and information technology capabilities, he says. The various companies' individual centers take up about 20,000 square feet on the second floor of the CyrusOne building on the Southwest Freeway. Ferdman says the systems comprise only about 5 percent of operations of CyrusOne, which, in addition to the data center, offers managed hosting and system and network services.

Other data centers may have areas where clients can send people to work in an emergency.

In Dynegy's suite, for example, each computer in more than 75 workstations is assigned for a specific area, ready, along with phones programmed to receive transferred calls, copy machines and other equipment. There's a "break room" with a refrigerator and microwave. Some companies have even stocked their spaces with provisions such as food and water, Ferdman notes. Some have a legal office, conference room or kitchen.

Companies with operations at the data center frequently send personnel to do "test runs" and -- even in good weather -- may use their centers a couple of times a year when, for example, the power is out in one of their buildings for scheduled maintenance. At least one company switched operations to the facility during the Super Bowl so that employees wouldn't have to fight the traffic downtown.

CyrusOne's Houston facility opened in 2000, and the company now has another data center near Bush Intercontinental Airport, plus a facility in Dallas, where some companies choose to back-up data. "Houston has hurricanes and water. Dallas gets more tornados," Ferdman notes. The impetus for the dedicated environments was Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, he says. When Hurricane Rita threatened, several companies had full operations under way in the center.

This article was originally published online at Houston Business Journal

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