IBM invests $300 million to expand disaster recovery offerings
Big Blue invests $300 million in opening 13 new Business Resilience Centers around the world; helping companies cope with and recover from disasters is lucrative new market
There is money to be made in in helping companies cope with and recover from disasters. In evidence: Big Blue’s latest moves. With the biggest investment in disaster recovery and business continuity infrastructure since Sungard bought Comdisco’s Availability Solutions business unit for $825 million in 2001, IBM has declared its intention to be a disaster recovery service provider worldwide. They are building thirteen new Business Resilience Centers to expand their services beyond the mainframe-based services for which they have become known.
IBM plans to use these centers, with the online backup and other technologies the company acquired with its purchase of Arsenal Digital Solutions, to provide disaster recovery services for those users and applications that can handle RTOs in hours at substantially lower cost than the traditional real time replication to dedicated recovery systems. Taking advantage of Arsenal’s cloud storage model, users can store their data in vaults at Resilience Centers and restore data to servers at the center or other alternate locations.
With sites in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bejing, Shanghai, Warsaw, and Izmir, Turkey — in addtion to New York, London, Paris, and Cologne — IBM is equipped to be a one stop shop for multinational corporations looking for DR services.
