Precept Ministries International

Storm spurs data storage

It’s easy to send shivers down the spine of an IT director.

Just mention the name Lulz Security, the international hacking group that stole and published identifying information about hundreds of thousands of consumers for about two months before disbanding. LulzSec broke into targets ranging from the U.S. Senate to Sony, stealing hundreds of thousands of passwords and account numbers.

Those stolen credit card numbers and email passwords are the new currency among information-age pirates, the 21st century’s pieces-of-eight. Unfortunately, if servers were ships, most small- to medium-size businesses would keep their data in leaky rowboats instead of secure Spanish galleons.

But that has started to change. While security threats always have been a danger to data-rich businesses, Chattanooga-area companies also have had to deal with tornado damage, while Memphis businesses have had to contend with floods that disrupted their computer systems.

Those watery wake-up calls have prompted IT directors to transfer their information, often thinly guarded on their own homegrown servers, to third-party vendors who have invested millions, and sometimes billions of dollars in giant data centers.

Chattanooga-based Terenine is one such vendor.

Terenine has four data centers, including the Terevault, Tennessee’s first Tier 3 data center. Physically entering the 12-inch thick, rebar-supported structure requires a retina scan or a cruise missile, officials say, and digitally accessing the facility is even harder.

TEREVAULT

Keeping spies out is important, but for customers themselves, accessing their data must be easy and seamless — as if the server was in the next room instead of in another city, according to David Glenn, chief technology officer and vice-president of enterprise operations at Terenine.

“We use high-speed equipment, so many people have us host their [data] infrastructure because we can do things in a very highly virtualized environment,” he said.

Virtualization is a current trend in IT in which a client who clicks on what appears to be their documents folder could actually be accessing data through a network connection from a hard drive in another city — a virtual hard drive.

“A lot of customers, with what happened with the tornadoes and what’s happened with the floods, a lot of people are looking for tier 3 data centers for security,” Glenn said.

Precept Ministries: Week Three - Romans 8: Learning and Living the ...

Always better than no Bible study. This is not a lazy, cop-out excuse.

What you have to understand about Diane is this: there is nothing about her that is lazy. The first day I met her was in a Precept class I was teaching. She was new to the class and new to the area. At that time she had three children under the age of three, two of whom were adopted, and she’d study her Bible every day during their naptime. Sometimes when you have the equivalent of triplets, stuff happens. Know what I mean? During this time, Diane learned those words that have given hope to me and so many others over the years.

Finally, I want you to know that I’m on the road this week, which means I’ll have less robust Internet access than I usually do. I’ll still have my phone and will be reading posts as they come in but a good part of the time I’ll be limited to typing responses with my thumbs so if my comments seem more brief than usual, know that’s the reason. Hey, some is better than none, right?

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