On July 12, a fire gutted Iron Mountain's 126,000-square-foot storage facility in London, destroying all of the records stored there, according to Melissa Mahoney, director of corporate communications at the Boston-based company.
An investigation is under way to determine the cause of the blaze, she said.
A day earlier, fire damaged a 65,000-square-foot Iron Mountain facility in Ottawa. Although the investigation isn't complete, the fire was likely caused by roofing contractors performing repairs at the building, Mahoney said. About 3 percent of the files in storage there were damaged, mostly by water, and less than half a percent were damaged beyond remediation, she said. Clients Have Questions
The fires prompted Rent-A-Center Inc. to step up plans to implement electronic achiving, said K.C. Condit, director of technical services at the Plano, Texas-based chain of 3,000 consumer-goods rental stores.
In the meantime, Condit is talking to his company's Iron Mountain representative about fire suppression in the warehouse used to store Rent-A-Center files.
Jeff Roberts, IT director at London-based Norton Rose, which lost some 7,000 files stored in the London facility, said the law firm was already setting up electronic archiving systems prior to the fire.
Norton Rose is using Clariion and Centera storage systems from EMC Corp. and document management software from Interwoven Inc. to create an archival system that is projected to go live in a couple of months, Roberts said. At that point, Norton Rose may no longer need to keep any rec-ords on paper, he said.
Neal Hennegan, director of technology at Gilsbar Inc. in Covington, La., has been looking for alternatives to Iron Mountain since Hurricane Katrina struck last year.
Gilsbar files stored in an Iron Mountain facility in Metairie, La., were not sent inland to Baton Rouge prior to Katrina as Hennegan requested, leaving them locked in an inaccessible building for a week after the storm.
Hennegan said he hasn't yet found an alternative that is as cost-effective as Iron Mountain or that can deliver media on demand in less than 24 hours.
However, "the days of physical remote storage are clearly numbered," he noted. "If we were a smaller shop, we'd be doing all our backups over the wire now."
Fires such as those that hit Iron Mountain's facilities are not unheard of, said Larry Medina, a Danville, Calif.-based records management professional at a company he asked not to be named. Medina, who is chairman of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators, cited three suspicious fires in March 1997 in an Iron Mountain facility in South Brunswick, N.J.
During Iron Mountain's earnings conference call last week, Chairman and CEO C. Richard Reese said that in response to the Ottawa fire, the company will take additional precautions during building repairs.
John Kenny Jr., executive vice president and chief financial officer, noted that Iron Mountain expects to exhaust a US$750,000 insurance deductible it has for each incident. However, the company is not changing its financial guidance for the rest of the year, executives said.