As from January next year, Rosemount, Illinois-based Comdisco Disaster Recovery Services Inc is to offer a new CDRS Net service which will link multiple recovery functions, and use a combination of fibre optics, microwave technology, and telecommunications gateways from AT&T. It comprises three elements – the CDRS network, a computer recovery facility, and a business recovery facility. CDRS Net provides transparent access to a number of different processors linked to recovery facilities, and customers can have single access to multiple long distance carriers. According to Comdisco, CDRS Net ensures continuity during natural or man-made business interruptions, regardless of the customer’s geographic location, multiplicity of computer systems, or mix of local and long distance carriers. The new service integrates the current range of products and services which include voice recovery, satellite back-up, electronic vaulting, trading floor back-up, mobile recovery facilities, and ComPASS I and II planning software. The CDRS network is the component that ties CDRS Net together. A dedicated wideband T-1 and T-3 network, it interconnects the other facilities, and service gateways will provide access to local and long distance carriers. All network media – fibre, microwave, copper and satellite – will be supported. Customers will be able to terminate a network at a business recovery facility, and through various routing options, integrate and manage a combination of CDRS functions simultaneously. These could include IBM, DEC and Tandem hot sites, electronic journalling, voice recovery or cheque processing. The Computer Recovery Facility is similar to current Recovery Centres, housing hot sites, and used to recover a customer’s information processing function. However, Comdisco says that the new facilities will have a much heavier concentration of computer hardware to provide a higher level of back-up. Access for testing or recovery can be local or through the new business recovery facility. The latter will contain customer control centres where subscribers can control both the network function and the operations of remote hot sites. They will also be able to recover functions such as voice, cheque processing, and workstations, or in specific situations, trading floors. Atlanta, Georgia and Cypress, California have been picked as the initial sites to be converted from hot to business recovery facilities.
