Telecom Ottawa this month unveiled a suite of managed hosted storage services suitable for businesses ranging from the very small to the very large.
The storage services come on the heels of Telecom Ottawa’s foray into voice over IP last month.
Telecom Ottawa is the telco arm of Hydro Ottawa and has been operating since 2001. The company also has holdings in Peterborough, Ont. and Cornwall, Ont.
Thanks to an agreement announced last month by 10 Ontario u-telcos, Telecom Ottawa’s storage services will be available throughout the province.
The hosted storage comes in three flavours.
A data backup and recovery offering gives customers hosted storage in Telecom Ottawa’s data centre that can be used as primary storage or backup. Customers can be connected to their storage at up to a gigabit of bandwidth. Storage will cost $1.25 per gigabit.
The second storage service, desktop backup and recovery, relies on an application installed on the user’s desktop or laptop to backup data whenever a file gets changed. The service costs $10 per month, which includes a gigabit of storage.
When Telecom Ottawa was trialing the service, it found its biggest audience in the medium enterprise, says Telecom Ottawa COO Dave Dobbin.
“IT managers realize desktops have a lot of files on them and users aren’t tranferring those files to the server,” he says.
Telecom Ottawa’s third storage offering is full enterprise-class backup for servers. The service is available with options to keep data 28 days, one year, or seven years.
Speeds available for this service can run up to a gigabit per second.
“The reason we did this was because of the new legislation out there,” says Dobbin, referring to Sarbanes-Oxley and PIPEDA. Both Sarbanes-Oxley and PIPEDA contain clauses that require companies to securely back up corporate data.
Pricing for the server backup option will vary depending on the amount of storage required and the amount of time the data must be held. All of the services are available now.
Telecom Ottawa is still a relatively unknown player in the telecom services market, says Iain Grant, an analyst with the Seaboard Group.
“But,” he adds, “they’re beginning to change that with what they’re doing.”
Related links:
