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Iron Mountain fires hasten backup options hunt

27.07.2006
Users said this week that two fires earlier this month at Iron Mountain facilities -- including one that destroyed a building in London -- could speed their moves to electronic systems that would obviate the need for such facilities.

Jeff Roberts, IT director at Norton Rose, a London law firm that lost some 7,000 files in a July 12 fire at Iron Mountain's London facility, was already setting up electronic archiving systems. The law firm is using Clariion and Centera storage systems from EMC Corp. and document management software from Interwoven Inc., and it expects the archival system to go live in a couple of months. At that point, Norton Rose may no longer need to keep anything on paper, Roberts said.

The fire in London destroyed Iron Mountain's 126,000-square-foot structure, according to Melissa Mahoney, director of corporate communications at Boston-based Iron Mountain. An investigation is under way to determine what happened and why fire suppression systems didn't work, she said.

Just a day earlier, a fire had damaged an Iron Mountain facility in Ottawa. About 3 percent of the files in storage there were damaged, mostly by water, and less than 0.5 percent were damaged beyond remediation, Mahoney said. While a probe into the cause of that blaze has not been completed, the fire is believed to have been caused by roofing contractors doing repairs. Fire suppression systems worked as designed in the 65,000-square foot Ottawa building.

Even before this month's fires, Neal Hennegan, director of technology at Gilsbar Inc. in Covington, La., was looking for alternatives to Iron Mountain. That's because when Hurricane Katrina struck last year, the Iron Mountain facility in Metairie, La., did not send Hennegan's tapes to Baton Rouge as requested. That meant he later had trouble getting his tapes after the facility flooded. However, Hennegan said he has not yet found an alternative that is as cost-effective or that can deliver media on demand in less than 24 hours.

Hennegan now keeps duplicate tapes at his own facilities -- as well as at Iron Mountain facilities -- and is considering a mirrored replication system. "The days of physical remote storage are clearly numbered," he said. "If we were a smaller shop, we'd be doing all our backups over the wire now."