Dobson Adds Data Storage Service to List
By Jim Stafford, The Daily Oklahoman
Nov. 5–Oklahoma City-based Dobson Telephone Co. is adding an online data storage and recovery business to the menu of telephone and data services it offers, officials said Friday.
Dobson launched a company this week called CoreVault Inc., which will use its fiber-optic network and data centers in Oklahoma City and Cheyenne to provide data storage services to clients in a five-state area.
“Our target market is businesses that have a concern or want to improve the security of their data and the reliability of getting it back if you have some sort of disaster or catastrophic loss of data either, whether it be a virus or human error,” Dobson Telephone Co. President James Rutherford said.
Rutherford said CoreVault’s products and managed services are designed to replace the tape backup systems many companies rely on today. The off-site storage is compressed and encrypted, reducing the chances that information could be compromised, as has been the case in some high-profile incidents with tape backup, he said.
CoreVault will store clients data at its data storage site in Oklahoma City. It is connected by Dobson’s private fiber network to a second storage site in Cheyenne, Rutherford said.
“Your data resides on two different locations 120 miles apart,” he said. “We think we have the premium service of anybody we’ve researched.”
CoreVault is offering its services to potential clients in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas.
A group of beta testers have used CoreVault’s online storage service for about 90 days, and all have been happy with the results, Rutherford said. It went live Tuesday with about 15 customers with about 40 to 50 others in the “pipe,” he said.
The online storage business is relatively new, but with a rapidly growing base of providers. CoreVault will have only about a 30-day head start on a second Oklahoma City business that will offer similar services.
Perimeter Technology Center, which operates secure data hosting centers in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, will offer online data storage and recovery services in conjunction with Edmond-based MidCon Data, said John Parsons, Perimeter’s chief executive officer.
“This is just a perfect time to launch such a product, and that’s why we’re working on the same thing,” Parsons said. “With the decreased cost of bandwidth and the ability to move more and more data electronically over the Internet, it has become a much more viable option.
“The recent (weather-related) disasters have caused an awful lot of interest in such an offering.
Rutherford said Dobson is not straying from its telecommunications roots with its new data storage services. The company already offers a menu of data services in addition to telephone service that includes dial-up and broadband Internet access, Web hosting and design, as well as operating fiber-optic networks and providing data transport services for other carriers.
“We are going to very aggressively attack the market place,” Rutherford said.
Dobson Telephone and related companies have been serving customers in rural Oklahoma communities for more than 70 years.
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