BlueMatrix Preps Research Datacenter, Tech Revamp

BlueMatrix has built a new datacenter at CenturyLink Technology Solutions'  (formerly known as Savvis) facility in Weehawken, NJ, having spent the last 10 years running its technology operations from the datacenter now owned by Google at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. The vendor will migrate operations to Weehawken this month, before moving client platforms to the new datacenter before the end of July, after which it will close the existing facility in Manhattan.

The Weehawken datacenter has been outfitted with all-new equipment and designed for greater redundancy, performance, availability and disaster recovery, said BlueMatrix chief information officer Ken Berkovec at a BlueMatrix client conference in New York last week.

The new facility will also provide additional capacity to support the onboarding of more clients and better time-to-market for clients. "We are currently supporting some US clients from London, so it is hard to add new clients because there is not enough room in our NY facility," Berkovec said.

In addition, the new datacenter will deliver three times as much internet bandwidth and twice as much power as the current datacenter, while only occupying half the space as a result of installing upgraded computers.

Once the move to Weehawken is complete, Berkovec said BlueMatrix will begin construction on another US facility, either in Las Vegas or Seattle, then will upgrade its datacenters in Europe to the same level of technology as the US datacenters, starting with its facility in Timisoara, Romania, then doing the same for its datacenter in London around the start of next year.

In the meantime, BlueMatrix will beef up its disaster recovery capabilities by using new hardware to move to live-warm backup in the third quarter of this year then later rewriting its software to support live-live backup. The vendor's current DR capability is a manual failover to an offsite backup, involving multiple staff, and requiring an estimated 60 minutes to restore service. "It took us four hours to come back online after [superstorm] Sandy. We need to be a zero-downtime platform," Berkovec said.

Berkovec joined BlueMatrix in March from Goldman Sachs, where he was a vice president, having also held various development roles at aerospace company L-3 Communications, Charles Schwab, Softgen, Citigroup, and IBM.