[September 22, 2004] Hurricane Charley Prompted GunnAllen Financial to Activate its Disaster Recovery Plan; Company Moved its IT Operation to Safety with Peak 10 TAMPA & JACKSONVILLE, Fla. --(Business Wire)-- Sept. 22, 2004 -- Peak 10 Provides Engineering Expertise and Reliable, Redundant Infrastructure for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Solutions Peak 10, the Southeast's leading data center and managed services provider, today announced it has activated several disaster recovery and business continuity plans over the past two months for clients in Florida. Peak 10 provides customers with a secure facility, redundant infrastructure and engineering expertise to ensure the availability, security and integrity of their critical data and business applications. In the face of tropical storm Bonnie and hurricane Charley, GunnAllen Financial successfully implemented its disaster recovery plan in August. The company moved its critical information technology infrastructure to safety inside Peak 10's enterprise-class data center in Tampa, Fla. GunnAllen also staffed a fully functioning onsite business continuity operations center at Peak 10. "We were concerned that power outages, mandatory evacuations and Internet service failures were a real possibility with hurricane Charley and decided to execute our business continuity plan. Our plan calls for an approach that teams with the best to protect our client's assets and interests. Key business partners such as The Revere Group, who specializes in IT management and business resumption planning, and Peak 10, who provided us with a secured 'hot site' facility were sound business decisions that had immediate return on investment," said Frank Biciolis, chief information officer with GunnAllen. "Peak 10's facility in Tampa provided us a scalable, resilient and secure operating environment with redundant power and interconnectivity to three additional facilities throughout the Southeast. They truly were instrumental in helping us weather the storm with no service interruptions or downtime experienced by our brokers or support staff." Since 1986, GunnAllen Financial, a Tampa-based full service brokerage and investment firm has been dedicated to helping clients achieve their financial goals. GunnAllen has 180 branch locations throughout the country consisting of over 900 registered reps. with more than 200 support staff at its corporate headquarters. Financial Planning Magazine ranked GunnAllen as the "Fastest Growing Independent Broker/Dealer" in the country. "We are very impressed with GunnAllen and applaud its IT organization for taking the proper steps to secure their operation," said Debra Curtiss, vice president and general manager of Peak 10 Tampa. "Our engineers and support staff worked with the GunnAllen team to quickly implement their organization's disaster recovery plan, ensuring the availability, continuity and security of GunnAllen's business systems and corporate data." Peak 10 owns and operates state-of-the-art data centers in Tampa and Jacksonville and Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C. that are all interconnected by Peak 10's private network. This geographic diversity and redundancy enables Peak 10 to meet its high availability objective and ensure business continuity for its customers' critical data and business applications. About Peak 10 Peak 10 is the Southeast's leading data center services provider offering a full range of hosting, storage, security and business continuity solutions. Customers such as the ATP Tour, RDU Airport, Ameristeel, Jefferson Pilot, LendingTree, Vertex and Siemens rely on Peak 10 to keep business critical applications up and running around-the-clock. The company owns and operates four enterprise-class data centers that deliver a higher standard of infrastructure, security and performance to businesses nationwide. Peak 10 has data centers in Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., as well as Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla. Additional information about Peak 10 is available at www.peak10.com. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]