IBM Spends $300 Million For 13 New DR Sites

With the biggest investment in disaster recovery and business continuity infrastructure since SunGard bought Comdisco's Availability Solutions business unit for $825 million in 2001, IBM has declared its intention to be a disaster recovery service provider worldwide. It is building 13 new "Business Resilience Centers" to expand its services beyond the mainframe-based services it is known for.IBM plans to use these centers, with the online backup and other technologies it acquired in the purchase of Arsenal Digital Solutions, to provide DR services for those users and applications that can handle RTOs in hours at substantially lower cost than the traditional real-time replication to dedicated recovery systems.

Taking advantage of Arsenal's cloud storage model, users can store their data in vaults at "Resilience Centers" and restore data to servers at the center or other alternate locations.

With sites in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bejing, Shanghai, Warsaw, and Izmir, Turkey, in addition to New York, London, Paris, and Cologne, IBM is equipped to be a one-stop shop for multinational corporations looking for DR services.