Care about your servers? Stash 'em away!

A new category of IT&C services for business consumers seems to have reached maturity on the Romanian market. It is about the IT bunkers, or as specialists put it: data centres. This is a mature economy-only business for the time being and only Poland and Hungary in our entire region have managed to grab a slice of it thus far.
IT bunkers are usually underground facilities, extremely secured against natural disasters, running on their own energy supplies, which host IT&C equipment, like servers, for instance. The clients are usually those companies whose data are worth much more than the weight in gold of the hard drives on which they are stored: banks, telecommunications or distribution companies etc.
Practically speaking, this is an outsourcing business. The data centres undertake all the security and continual operation issues of the vital IT&C equipment, which includes backing up databases. A downtime of more than one second for such equipment can seriously impact on the business of any telecom operator.
Several years ago, Ovidiu Crisan, one of the founders of the Kappa cable TV operator realised the potential of this business. He invested part of the $8 million he got from selling Kappa to Astral Telecom in building a data centre on Calea Dorobanti. The data centre was installed in the basement of a former charcuterie, where Crisan was the first to smell the cash. He is no longer alone, as the current edition of the biggest domestic IT&C fair sees Ines Internet Service Provider presenting the first data centre in Romania which as its officials say, was developed in line with the Western standards. The IT bunker dedicated by Ines several days ago is an 160 sqm wide underground facility and is located in the Aviatiei area. It has two fibre optics lines installed and is guaranteed by the German designer to withstand earthquakes above 8 degrees Richter, Iosif Szavuj, Ines executive manager says. victor@zf.ro