History 2001: World Trade Center’s Twin Towers Attack

After consulting our WW data storage file containing 6,900+ companies, we found 21 with operations in New York City, and thankfully none located in the leveled World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.

The most pressing concern in the aftermath of the horrific attack is indisputably the loss of life. We were, therefore, dismayed to find a few storage companies seizing the opportunity to sound an alarmist note to customers, with pitches such as “Do you have a disaster recovery plan?“

There is no question of course, that data was also lost in the collapse of the towers – personal data on PCs, not to mention paper files and archives, in particular – but such a consideration seems irrelevant in comparison to the human tragedy.

For informational purposes only, EMC reported it had 25 clients in the WTC, half with replication systems to backup their data as far afield as Texas, Idaho as well as neighboring New Jersey.

Archiving firm Iron Mountain said many key operations for its 10-odd customers were up within hours.

According to U.S. military officials, Pentagon data was fully backed up and no information was lost.

On a happier note, Joseph Kovar, a reporter for CRN, informed us that Jacob Herbst, CEO of Israeli start-up storage networking firm FilesX, previously the co-founder, chairman and CEO of SanCastle, narrowly missed taking one of the LA-bound flights that crashed into the towers. Herbst had been meeting with well-known senior analyst Steve Duplessie of The Enterprise Storage Group. The Israeli army veteran was already in his car and headed to the airport when Duplessie called him back to give him information about a potential employee and to schedule a meeting, causing Herbst to miss his flight.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 164 on September 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.