We were a little bemused by a release from IBM Business Recovery Services in Sterling Forest, New York heralding the world’s first hot site designed by a team composed of customer executives: it says that the centre – IBM’s fifteenth in the US – is characterised by additional features suggested as essential by a team of 17 customers representing industries ranging from banking and retailing to entertainment and manufacturing – and what are these brilliant innovations? Among the many capabilities recommended by the customer-IBM team and featured at the Sterling Forest Recovery Center are 200 workspaces for local network, end-user and distributed computing environments; uninterruptable power supply; alternate power generation; multiple power sources; dual power feeds; diversely routed and self-healing Synchronous Optical Network; multiple carrier access; and redundant chillers and circulation pumps – silly us, and there we were thinking that things like redundant chillers, self-healing networks, alternate routes, uninterruptible power supplies were things one would expect to find in any disaster recovery centre.
