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Plan-b opens standby facilities in Wellington

Plan-b opens standby office facilities for businesses in Wellington

Businesses in Wellington will be able to survive even total site loss with minimal disruption, following the opening of a fully equipped standby office facility in the city today. (29 October 2009)

The new facility at 210 Main Road, Tawa, is the most advanced yet opened by Plan-b, New Zealand’s largest dedicated business continuity provider.

Plan-b has similar facilities at two Auckland sites and in Hamilton, as well as two mobile facilities built onto modified trucks. These fully equipped facilities are kept in a state of readiness, to be pressed into action at very short notice whenever a Plan-b OfficeNOW customer requires it.

The Wellington facility provides Plan-b clients with 70 fully equipped work stations with PC terminals, a server, telephones, PABX, data circuits and even kitchen facilities and parking for staff.

“The idea is to allow vital nerve centre functions of a business to continue to function despite the loss of servers or even a customer’s whole building,” says Symon Thurlow, Technical Director of Plan-b.

Site loss happens most frequently due to fire or water damage, but can also be caused by crime, especially if police cordon off the office, or even by outbreaks of diseases such as legionnaires disease, which struck Christchurch in 2005.

“If their normal office is out of action or inaccessible, people will be able to come to our standby facility and continue to work in the computing environment they’re used to, with their familiar desktop and even with their same direct dial phone number they had in their regular office.”

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As Plan-b also does data backup, it is possible to recreate the client’s programs and data exactly.

“For businesses who use our ServerNOW online backup service, we can have the standby facility ready with their data loaded and operational by the time they arrive there,” says Thurlow. “If they do their backups on tape or other physical media, this takes a bit longer to recover, but customers will still be working within a very short time.”

In a first for Plan-b, the Wellington standby office facility can even offer full call centre functionality.

The company also achieved a national first by using virtual desktop infrastructure – an achievement that earned Plan-b business infrastructure virtualization company VMware’s award for business continuity earlier this week. The award was given for the most creative use of VMware’s technology in relation to providing business continuity.

“Users will not notice anything different from when they worked on their regular PCs, but actually all the processing will happen in Auckland, with the live screen image transmitted to Wellington via a 24MBit/s data link with no discernable delay.”

Plan-b first opened its doors in Wellington earlier this year and offered businesses use of its mobile standby facilities up to now. The company runs a backup collection service and local vault in the capital for storing customers’ backup media, though many customers are now choosing to use Plan-b’s industry-leading automatic online backups.

Recently, the company opened an office in Christchurch too. The standby office facility in that city is expected to be operational in December.

“Business interruptions pose a massive risk that put many companies out of business completely,” says Thurlow. “We see Plan-b as something akin to an insurance company. We offer businesses a way to mitigate risk with preventative measures and, should disaster strike, getting back up and running with minimum disruption.”

ENDS

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