Underground sensation: DataChambers making a name for itself keeping clients safe and sound

From the September 30, 2005 print edition

You're deep underground, surrounded by thick concrete walls and heavy steel doors, with biometric security locks and cameras watching you from every angle. Technicians watch computer monitors flicker on wall-sized screens 24 hours a day.

You're not imagining it. Underneath the nondescript and sprawling Salem Business Park building that houses DataChambers' offices, along with sister companies also owned by brothers Andy and Bruce Brown such as Adele Knits and Twin City Warehouses, lies what once would have been Ground Zero in Winston-Salem.

Here, 18 feet under ground, was one of a few sites in the country where guidance systems for the military's arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles were designed and fabricated during the Cold War.

They said at the time it could withstand a 10 megaton nuclear blast. Fortunately, that claim was never tested.

Still, if it's a feeling of security Data-Chambers' CEO Nick Kottyan wants, he knows just where to go. And given that he's leading a relatively young firm in an industry against multibillion-dollar, multinational competitors like IBM and SunGard, he might be forgiven a few moments a day cowering in the blast-proof bunker.

Instead, he'll take any opportunity to show off the place, beaming with pride all the while.

"It's a one-of-a-kind facility in the region, anywhere from Northern Virginia all the way down to Florida," Kottyan says. "We don't know of another one like this."

More than curiosity

DataChambers' bomb-proof data center is much more than a gee-whiz curiosity -- it's key to the firm's business plan. It provides the small, three-year-old company legitimacy by giving it an infrastructure advantage that even its giant competitors would be hard-pressed to buy or build today.

DataChambers co-locates servers for companies that would rather have someone else handle their computer network hardware day to day. Its business continuity functions come into play when disaster strikes a client firm.

No matter what happens to the home office, the data is secure in DataChambers' bunker, and the office upstairs can provide workspace and computers for up to 1,000 displaced employees if necessary. For example, a financial firm from the Gulf Coast region moved people in for several days after Hurricane Katrina.

In 2000, an outside group tried and failed to start a data center at the property, and Brown said he and his brother had to decide whether they wanted to be in the business themselves, rather than just the landlords.

"It was sort of a crap shoot, if you will," Brown said. "There were people who had expressed some interest to us about that kind of thing, but they weren't beating down the door. But after a while with a wait-and-see attitude, we decided to go for it," in part because such a business would complement their existing records storage and management firm.

'Can't be all things'

The bunker was there, but there was a lot of retrofitting and other work to be done to turn it into a modern facility. Lawrence Boening, the company's current chief technical and operating officer, led the early setup of the firm as president, until Kottyan joined in August 2004.

Kottyan said once the infrastructure was in place, the company started to fall prey to a common business startup trap.

"Early on the desire and the hope is always to garner that almighty dollar of revenue, and that tends to lead you to try to be all things to all people," Kottyan said. "When that happens, you'll fail, because you can't be all things to all people, at least not well."

Kottyan had founded data center provider Peak 10 in Charlotte, which also has a disaster recovery service. With his own background for guidance, Data-Chambers focused in on its data center and business continuity functions.

"The business in our region was crying out for someone who could provide them solutions similar to what the big guys provided, but at a local price and local service level, and somebody who could deal with issues of small to medium-size business," Kottyan said. "Those issues are very different from those of a Wachovia or Bank of America."

With that in mind, DataChambers started building its client base, using existing contacts to open doors to companies that were either young and small enough that they hadn't yet established an alternative business continuity plan, or larger but at a point in their technical development that provided an opening.

For instance, data center manager Patrick Craig introduced DataChambers to Bob Travatello, the chief information officer at the propane provider Blue Rhino in Winston-Salem.

"We looked at a couple of other options, but (DataChambers) gave us some good, aggressive pricing and we loved the facility there, which is obviously very unique and secure," Travatello said.

Blue Rhino had been using a data center in Texas, but Travatello said the distance made it difficult for him and his team to monitor, maintain and upgrade their equipment. The data center provided those services, but as Travatello points out, techies often like to perform important tasks themselves.

Benefiting from storms

After Blue Rhino moved its data to DataChambers, it tried out the business continuity service and found accessibility equally as important there. Travatello said they had tried to run business continuity and disaster drills before, but traveling as far as Atlanta for such tests was a major burden.

"Now we've done two or three tests (at DataChambers), and we just drove a few minutes down, the phones were already hooked up, the computers hooked into our network. It was a very simple process," he said.

Travatello said his firm is so pleased with DataChambers that it will soon be doubling the size of its business continuity contract there, moving that business over from the big competitor SunGard.

Kottyan said more clients are coming on board and expanding their contracts. While DataChambers is private and doesn't reveal financial information, he said its customer base doubled in 2004 and has already more than doubled again in 2005.

Events like hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which allowed DataChambers to showcase the benefits of its service to Gulf Coast customers, have helped grow sales. But Kottyan knows that once the storms stop making news, most companies will return to business as usual, which often doesn't include an emphasis on disaster planning.

The company's efforts now include shortening its sales cycle, which has tended to be lengthy because customer data needs can be very complex.

"After Sept. 11, I was running a data center and people would say to me, this must be great for business. But since then, spending on disaster recovery and business continuity has only increased 10 percent," Kottyan said. "Memory is short when bad things happen. That's human nature."

-- Matt Evans, The Business Journal, Serving the Greater Triad Area

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For more information contact:
Adam Moffitt, 336-499-7211
For more information on DataChambers, LLC:
http://www.datachambers.com