The provision of computer disaster recovery services appears to be something of a growth area at the moment with finance companies anxious to safeguard against the threats of bomb and fire damage. London-based facilities management company Trans-Act Ltd already has signed three customers to its Business Recovery Centre, opened last November, and Granada Computer Services Ltd’s Birmingham-based subsidiary Computer Disaster Recovery Ltd has announced that it too is to open a hot site near King’s Cross, London. The new 8,000 square foot, multimillion pound Business Recovery Centre will serve Hewlett-Packard Co, Digital Equipment Corp and IBM Corp users and can support up to 140 people if disaster strikes. It comprises seven recovery rooms, each kitted out with network-ready personal computers that users can then arrange to link up to various data feeds as they see fit. A fleet of 21 mobile computer rooms – ‘magic caravans’ as one customer dubbed them – offering cover for eight different systems including IBM AS/400, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, Data General Corp, now-defunct Prime Computer Inc, ICL Plc, Bull HN Information Systems Ltd and Wang Laboratories Inc machines, will supplement the Recovery Centre. It will cost several hundred thousand pounds to subscribe to the Recovery Centre with fees dependent on the number of rooms required. AST’s secretly located Business Recovery Facility, meantime, provides 40 back-up trading positions and a further 140 back office positions. Front office provision includes 32 keyboard dealing positions connected to a Reuters Digital backbone network, eight Reuters Personal Trader workstations, 40 Tie dealer boards and three voice recorders. Reuter’s Select Feed and Telerate digital page feeds are available at up to 30 positions; there are five Reuter’s Dealing 2,000 feeds and access to CNN news. There are 36 80486-based personal computers and a number of matrix and laser printers available in the back office and all 140 desks have Token Ring and Ethernet cabling points. There is also a PABX system, access to the City Fibre Network and to the Swift system by which banks make treasury payments to each other. AST says it will take on a maximum of six customers, whose head offices must be located at least 400 yards apart since the recovery facility can cover only one disaster a time. Cover is provided for three months initially and is renewable after that unless another customer should need to use it – occupants then have an hour to clear out. A five year contract costs between UKP115,000 and UKP130,000.
