Houston pilots award disaster recovery contact at port

AUSTIN, Tex.–Houston Pilots has awarded Data Foundry a multi-year disaster recovery contract and will utilize Data Foundry’s Disaster Recovery Campus and Work-Site Recovery Center in Austin, Texas. With history dating back to 1921, Houston Pilots is responsible for safely navigating 8,500 vessels on 19,000 transits carrying more than 200 million tons of cargo through the Port of Houston each year.

“The intensity of the 2005 hurricane season made it clear to Houston Pilots that a disaster would not only affect the channel but, given the proximity to the coast, could completely disrupt our primary operations location,” said senior consultant Dave Morrell of Houston Pilots.

“Houston Pilots relies on critical server operations for information and data vital to the successful passage of ships through the Port. Each pilot who boards a ship requires information from dispatchers, tug boat operators, Coast Guard, the Port of Houston personnel, and other maritime organizations. Since much of this data converges within our server environment we cannot afford downtime.”

“We needed the ability to literally move our operations from the coastal area to a secondary location without skipping a beat. The strategy had to include an offsite location to house our mission-critical servers and work space so our pilots and dispatchers could continue working. The secondary location had to be close enough to Houston to drive in case of wide scale airport grounding as seen after 9/11, yet a safe distance from the Gulf. Since families would probably go with employees, it must have access to ample hotels and restaurants for an extended stay,” detailed Morrell.

Data Foundry will provide secure data center space within their Austin Data Center to locate servers, redundant Internet connections, and dedicated work space, including cubicles and private offices in their Work-site Recovery Center. The Data Foundry Austin Data Center is located 220 miles inland from the coast in the Data Foundry Disaster Recovery Campus with two dedicated power substations, redundant generators, six hotels, several restaurants, hiking trails and plenty of parking, all minutes away from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.