December 28th , 2007 - The Daily Oklahoman

Questions and Answers with John Parsons

By Jim Stafford
The Oklahoman

Today's Q&A is with the chief executive officer of Perimeter Technology Center, which operates secure data centers in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, where computer servers for hundreds of clients are housed.

Q: What kind of disruptions did the recent ice storm cause for you or the clients hosted in your data center?  

A: Our business was not affected by the recent ice storm, and thus our customers that house their servers inside our Oklahoma City and Tulsa data centers had full access to those systems. The very nature of our business is such that we put redundancies in place for power, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), connectivity/communications and physical security to ensure full operations in these very types of situations. Customers whose offices were affected were able to reach their critical IT infrastructure housed in our centers by simply getting to another location that had power and communications; such as their homes, satellite offices or even a Starbuck's with power and WiFi. We also had multiple companies operating a core of their staff out of our Business Continuity Office Space in our Tulsa facility.

Q: How long can you operate your data center without power from the electric utility?

A: We can operate indefinitely without grid power due to our generators and fuel delivery services from companies like Red Rock Distributing. We had intermittent power throughout the event but chose to operate on generators for approximately 55 hours to ensure quality power.

Q: What kind of comments did you receive from clients in the wake of the ice storm?

A: We received several compliments on our operations during the storm. We received the following comments via e-mail from Jason P. Cortassa, director of information technology at Tulsa's Global Power Equipment Group Inc. after the ice storm:

"I wanted to congratulate PTC for a job well done during last week's disastrous event. Without PTC, (Global Power) would have been down for at least three days. Due to your impeccable service, all of our business critical and noncritical servers were only down for approx four hours on Monday morning. This down time was only due to the relocation of servers not located at PTC. Many large companies around Tulsa were hit very hard by this disaster due to non-redundant services such as PTC and we appreciate your around the clock support.”

Q: What advice do you have for business owners to prepare for the next weather event?

A: The most economical solution would be to start using a commercial data center such as Perimeter. Outside of that, a substantial capital investment in the redundancies mentioned above: onsite generator, UPS system (backup batteries) and redundant connectivity just to name a few.

Q: What other types of potential disasters await businesses that maintain lots of computer servers?

A: We would like companies to realize that these widespread events get the headlines, but businesses are affected year round. Power outages, loss of internet connectivity, human error and hardware failure can impact any business, any time. With the criticality of data and the 24/7 culture of today's business climate, now more than ever downtime is truly detrimental to both a company's bottom line and reputation.

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