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Fortress builds business on Dell blades

Fortress builds business on Dell blades For a startup basing its business on a strong foundation of technology, finding the right IT partner was essential.

Fortress Data Vaulting, a service and consulting firm, offers remote backup services, remote archive services, business continuity consulting, PIPEDA consulting, on-site training and technical support. The aim is to protect clients from unexpected business stoppages, interruptions and attacks, while meeting regulatory standards – and this often translates into a reduction in operational costs.

“We’re providing an offsite business continuity and disaster recovery solution that’s cheaper for our customers than tape,” said Brian Brock, CTO of Fortress Data Vaulting, based in London, Ont. To get started, the company has purchased a Dell TM PowerEdgeTM Blade Server, Dell PowerEdge Chassis and Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller. It’s also using Windows Server® 2008, MicrosoftSQL Server® 2008 and Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, with the option of Microsoft Hyper-V for future virtualization activities.


Fortress will physically travel to a customer’s site in southwestern Ontario to perform local backup, eliminating the hassle of transferring terabytes of data over the Internet. Everyday changes are then sent securely over the Internet using AES 256 encryption which is what the US Military usestoday. We’re planning on implementing a stronger blowfish encryption, but it’s still in development The long-term goal is to roll out franchises across Canada.

“That’s why we bought the Dell iSCSI array and blade server, because eventually we’re going to have multiple servers and virtualization and take advantage of all of the things that Dell can do,” said Brock.

Fortress is also launching its AutoBackup Web site for home users and small businesses at www.autobackup.ca, which provides online remote backup and archive services. To date, it has a range of customers; its largest has signed on for several terabytes of data, while the smallest has signed on for 15KB.

“We have a concept of auto-archiving where you back up your data to our server, and if you don’t change or restore it after 30 days, it becomes archived and we charge you less,” said Brock. The company charges $3 a month per Gigabyte, and if the data hasn’t changed after 30 days, it’s archived at $1 per Gigabyte.

“The ability to do virtualization, especially on the blade chassis, and to change physical hardware without having to take our services down is huge to us, and that’s certainly where we’d like to go,” said Brock. “That’s why we’re starting out with high-end equipment – we made the decision to spend $30,000 on hardware instead of $10,000 so we could build on it and scale our business.”

Fortress got quotes from several vendors. HP came back with a quote for $75,000, while a local wholesaler offered to build the servers for $95,000. “Then I called Dell and they said we could do this for $30,000,” said Brock. “And Dell hardware and software is pretty bulletproof.”

But, for a company that’s differentiating itself on services – by actually showing up at a customer’s site to do the initial backup – the other deciding factor was Dell service and support.

“When you pick up the phone and call Dell, you can actually talk to a live human being,” said Brock. “If I have to pick up the phone, I don’t want to spend an hour on hold, so when somebody from Dell calls me back in five minutes, that’s huge to me.”

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