Teaming Up on DR

Two Minneapolis/St. Paul service providers have come up with a novel way to sell disaster recovery services to local businesses. Verispace and Agiliti are jointly marketing a business continuity package in which Twin Cities companies can easily set up primary and backup installations in the providers' two data centers, which are on opposite sides of the metro area.

"This agreement provides a service delivery platform that just hasn't been available in the Twin Cities until now," said Dave Walstad, Agiliti's vice president of sales and marketing. Customers can have their IT systems hosted at Agiliti's data center in St. Paul's Energy Park, Walstad explained, while the VeriSpace facility in Edina can host their recovery systems - or vice versa. The providers are offering packages that will establish a completely mirrored "hot site" at the alternate data center to provide rapid recovery of business operations in the event of a disaster or failure.

"The arrangement offers an important geographic advantage for the customers of both firms - giving them access to world-class hosting centers on both sides of the metro," said Gene Randol, president of VeriSpace. The marketing agreement also calls for Agiliti to provide managed IT service options to customers located in the VeriSpace data center and to provide on-site engineering and maintenance support 24 X 7. The Agiliti and VeriSpace data centers are now in the process of being linked via a high-speed fiber-optic connection.

The first customer is RemotePipes Inc., which provides enterprises with remote Internet access and

network access when their employees are away from the office. "We needed to have two data centers connected via high-speed links for disaster-recovery and high-availability purposes," said Doug Bonestroo, CEO of remote Pipes. "The big benefit for us with this Agiliti-VeriSpace partnership is the peace of mind that comes along with a geographically distributed application architecture. If St. Paul

suffers a catastrophic outage and Minneapolis is still available, we're still in business."