SolutionPro partners with Utah data centers for great disaster recovery 

SolutionPro, a Boise-based IT firm that provides data protection and colocation solutions, has partnered with Salt Lake City-based C7 Data Centers to expand its disaster recovery offerings.

 

David Baldwin, Vice President of Business Development at SolutionPro, said the partnership will allow the companies to re-sell data center space to one another’s customer base, giving them both access to out-of-state markets and providing customers with additional redundancy to protect sensitive information.

 

“It’s really an opportunity for both of us to have a mini-regional expansion,” Baldwin said.

 

“We’re a fairly local company; most of our business is around Idaho,” he said. “We do have customers in California and New York and various places around the country, but the bulk of our business is in Idaho and the Boise Metro Area. The partnership with C7 gives us a presence in another state, it gives us a path to customers in other states, and so it’s one more step on the road to the regional expansion.”

 

Founded in 2002, SolutionPro employs about 29 and, in addition to providing small- and medium-sized businesses with data backup systems, offers IT customer support, VoIP and Internet connectivity.

 

Baldwin said the need for secure, off-site data storage becomes ever-more important as business is done digitally, over the Internet and with the use of smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry.

 

“Businesses are just so dependent on computerized data that if anything were to happen to those computers the business is gone,” he said.

 

Threats to data can be as dramatic as tornadoes, earthquakes and floods, or as mundane as a malfunctioning sprinkler system, computer virus or just someone tripping over a power cord.

 

“It could be huge natural disasters or a localized disaster in just your system,” Baldwin said. “That information is not readily available. You can’t just boot it back up.”

 

But if that data is stored at a managed or virtual server elsewhere, workers can access the necessary information from remote locations and keep things moving. Baldwin said best practices dictate that data stored at a geographically redundant center should be within a day’s drive or a one- or two-hour flight, “so they can put a technician on a plane or a car and get access to their data up and running.”

 

In addition to expanded data backup and recovery, the partnership with C7 will also give customers real-time data replication, redundant networks, power and cooling systems.

 

Baldwin said the move, which gives SolutionPro access to all four of C7’s Utah data centers, comes after a year of steady growth for the company. In 2008 SolutionPro doubled its sales and twice had to expand its data center floor space to keep up with demand.

 

While things have slowed in 2009, Baldwin said the company is still growing faster than any of the three years prior to 2008.

 

“We’re still pretty happy with that considering the state of the economy and the state of consumer hesitancy,” he said.

 

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