Auckland-based disaster recovery and backup provider Plan-b was a big winner at the fourth VMware virtualisation forum held in Sydney this week.

Plan-b won the business continuity award for excellence in promoting business continuity through the use of VMware technology.

Plan-b technical director Symon Thurlow told NBR at the conference in Sydney yesterday he was delighted with the award. Mr Thurlow said Plan-b used VMware’s technology as a foundation platform on which it had built its own application.

The award was for the company’s innovative use of technology, which will connect all its recovery centres around the country to its central recovery centre in Albany, Auckland.

“Plan-b has made a huge investment in infrastructure in Auckland. We have tons of server infrastructure (now in Auckland). We are expanding throughout the country, with our Wellington centre opening today and our recovery centre opening in Christchurch in December,” he said.

Mr Thurlow said Plan-b wanted to expand to different parts of the country to prevent duplicating its investment in Auckland.

He added disaster recovery and backup was critical, as an IT failure could disable a business and allow its competitors to gain a greater market share of its customers while its services were down.

Plan-b’s new facility in Tawa, Wellington, is Plan-b’s most advantage recovery centre. The company also has a recovery centre in Hamilton.

Mr Thurlow said the new facility would operate as the company’s central nervous centre, allowing business to continue despite the loss of servers or a customer’s whole building.

Plan-b said site loss was often caused by civil disasters such as fire, floods and earthquakes but crime and outbreaks of disease could also affect how a company operates.

“If their normal office is out of action or inaccessible, people will be able to come to our standby facility and continue to work in the computing environment they’re used to, with their familiar desktop and even with their same direct dial phone number they had in their regular office,” Mr Thurlow said.

Other award winners at the VMware virtualisation conference include:

Customer Awards:

Transpacific Solutions from Brisbane won the data center automation award.

Teletech in Sydney won the virtual desktop ingenuity award.

Corrs Chambers Westgarth in Melbourne won the unbreakable applications award.

Partner Awards included:

Datacom Australia won the partner technical achievement award 2009.

Melbourne IT won the virtual champion of the year 2009. It was the first company in the world to deploy VMware vSphere 4.

Logica won the rising star 2009:

Dell Australia and New Zealand won the market maker 2009