Enhanced business continuity, Eisenstein says, is proving to be an outstanding side benefit. In the past, it would take two days to recover about 5 Gbytes of backed-up data after a problem or outage. Today, tests show it can be done in about four hours. "It's increasing our abilities in case of a disaster," he says.
Calpine uses the services of Iron Mountain Inc., which provides remote-data protection to about 17,000 businesses in the United States. Iron Mountain works with software vendor LiveVault Corp. to deliver its Electronic Vaulting service, which includes online backup and storage in secure off-site facilities.
In addition to moving aggressively into online recovery, Iron Mountain still provides tape and even paper storage for companies that need them. It also offers automated backup and storage of e-mail to help businesses meet compliance rules governing the retention of documents.
Iron Mountain's broad offering sets it apart from competitions, says Adam Couture, an analyst at Gartner. "A customer backing up to tape from a data center could use Iron Mountain's physical service but also could deploy online backup for its remote servers," he says.
Pricing depends on the amount of data that needs to be backed up, the number of locations, and how long the information needs to be stored. Iron Mountain says a basic package of services for small to midsize businesses starts at $199 per month.
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