BTi News
- B-Telecom Inc. is Nothing if not Redundant, Redundant, Redundant
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// June 26, 2007
The provider of backup data and retrieval services for computer systems of all sizes will soon move its headquarters near Cleveland to Columbiana County where a 22,000-square-foot building and 3,000-square-foot annex are under construction.
Were B-Telecom not such a provider, the Army would not have signed its first contract with a private-sector entity for such services late last month. "I just met with the Department of Defense to get fiber [optic cable] to the facility in Virginia," the company's president and chief executive officer, Paul Allen, said the next day.
"It's the first time the Department of Defense has allowed a private company to secure their data on their facilities," he points out. "Nobody else has it." With a slight smile, he adds that it will be the only such backup site in the United States guarded by armed soldiers.
The need for enterprises such as BTi, as B-Telecom abbreviates itself, got a huge boost in the aftermath of 9/11, Allen says. The state of Ohio's efforts to limit the damage resulting from a Department of Administrative Services stolen computer tape also underscores the need for BTi, adds Tracy Drake, chief executive officer of the Columbiana County Port Authority.
The backup tape, stolen from a state intern's car, contained vast amounts of sensitive financial information on state employees, their dependents, state lottery winners and Ohioans issued tax refunds.
BTi has a site just outside Cleveland where its customers transmit their critical computer files so they can retrieve them should a major disaster strike - fire, flood, widespread and lengthy electrical outage, earthquake, lightning. The site in Columbiana County will become a second backup site that collects and stores the same information as that just outside Cleveland.
The Army base in Virginia will be a third site, equally redundant, and Allen mentions building yet a fourth center elsewhere in the Midwest.
In discussing his new headquarters, Allen says of his clients, "They could mirror all their data at this location. If a disaster hit [destroying their places of business or making them inaccessible], they could travel to Columbiana County, hit a button and go back to work without missing a beat."
BTi's capacity to store data, while not infinite, isn't far removed. "We have unlimited data storage," Allen says, "limited only by space, not bandwidth." The new headquarters, when completed, will be able to hold 500 million gigabytes of information. "To put that into perspective," says Adam Zimmerman, vice president for marketing and sales, "BTi could host the entire database of the Library of Congress and then duplicate and back up those files nearly six million times."
In addition to administrative offices, the new headquarters will offer individual suites for large clients that have massive quantities of information to store. Small-business customers, whose needs aren't nearly as great, will use an "open caged area."
BTi offers "product packages as low as $50 a month," Allen says, which allows the client to download data as often as once every business day. "If they have Internet access, they can sign up immediately. We come to your office, take away what you want to store on a disk and enter it in our [system].
"We never use backup tapes," he emphasizes, and suggests that expense is no longer a valid reason for a small-business owner to take backup tapes home with him, or assign employees to do so.
The company's new headquarters, built for some $3 million with financial help from the port authority, should employ 50 within 36 months and they will have "the expertise to take Columbiana County and northeastern Ohio to the forefront of information technology," Drake says.
Zimmerman points out "the incredible detail involved" in the design of the building, "and we do it ourselves, so we can provide a higher degree of confidence."
BTi has designed and built all its structures, he notes. "Our construction methods reduce the costs of our service up to 60%," Zimmerman says. "By building our own centers, it makes what we do better."
BTi owns and operates its own construction division. This allows the data centers it builds "to be constructed with the highest standard of quality," says the vice president for marketing.
"There are a lot of bright kids in this area," Allen says. No longer will they have to leave to find high-paying jobs in the computer industry. "We need security, to man the telephones, and people who can write software."
Drake waxes enthusiastic about BTi as he watches its new headquarters go up just outside Leetonia in World Trade Park, owned by the port authority.
"Columbiana County has been in the Dark Ages as far as historical access to modern communications," Drake continues. Allen, a 19-year veteran of the industry, has the experience and breadth of knowledge to change all that, Drake believes.
Included in that structure will be "3,000 square feet of space to become a school of excellence," Allen says, "an outpost of Case Western Reserve University where distance learning will take place.
"A lot of developmental work will be done there," he continues. "We'll be testing software there." Case hasn't told him of the scope of its plans. All he's certain of is that students in the annex can "bring a laptop and access what Case has to offer."
BTi, founded in 2000, increasingly finds itself indispensable as small companies and nonprofits realize the need for truly secure and reliable backup systems where they can afford to store their data. Larger companies, especially providers of financial services, have long had their own systems that they've maintained at considerable expense.
BTi controls a fiber-optic network thousands of miles long, Allen says. Besides "being redundant" - redundant is a word he repeats often - "it runs on a 10 gig backbone.
"We handle all sizes of businesses," Allen says, as well as hospital systems and local government agencies, asking that their names not appear in print.
Information stored in computers and on computer disks has greater potential than most appreciate to be lost, misplaced, destroyed, corrupted or stolen, regardless of the safeguards a company puts in place. And more often than most realize, safeguards such as encryption are not employed.
"Our networks are totally redundant," Allen says. "Your information can't be lost."
Allen, born in England, "delivered papers at 7 and worked evenings in a butcher shop when I was 12."
Assigned to secure new accounts, he went to work for British Telecom 19 years ago in London's financial district. B-Telecom, he says, is not a play on British Telecom's name but originated when he was on vacation in Canada, lounging in a boat on a bay. He wanted to name the company he would found Bay Telecom but it was too similar to that of another company. So Bay Telecom became B-Telecom.
Employees of FedEx met him in 1985 during a seminar in Brussels, Belgium, and recruited him to work for them. "They offered to bring me to America," he recalls, and while unfamiliar with FedEx, he was intrigued and between 1986 and 1988 "completed the design and implementation of [FedEx's] European and Pacific Rim networks."
He left to return to Britain and form his own company, Satillink, "one of the first to offer a broadband service against British Telecom. But I missed America and your entrepreneurial spirit" and he went to work for a telecommunications company in Jackson, Miss. As a major-account manager, he was responsible for overseeing its national accounts in six Southern states.
He left in 1999 and joined Hyperion to round out his knowledge of the industry "and learn the local part." Adelphia bought Hyperion, and soon after Adelphia's founder and his family found themselves accused of fraud and looting their company. Allen left the company and struck out on his own.
Mission Critical : The success of your operation depends on having essential data available at all times and having an effective connection to the world. BTi can assist you with both.