Contact Abacus Marketing Resources
Abigail M. Ransonet
337-962-2800

Friday, May 16, 2008
Lafayette, LA.

Most businesses were still closed when an early morning tornado ripped through the business sector known as Lafayette’s Oil Center yesterday at daybreak.   The twister plowed a path ripping off roofs, blowing out windows and doors and mangling long-standing trees. 

The Travis Technology Center was directly in the path of Thursday morning’s destruction.   The Abacus Data Exchange is in the heart of this newly renovated building, a Post-Katrina project by New Orleans based developer Ruth Ann Menutis.  The data center is a secured facility dedicated to safe-guarding data and advanced broadband services under both normal and extraordinary conditions.   This particular day in May proved to be far from ordinary. 

Ordinary operations for the data center include advanced broadband services, hosting virtual dedicated servers, offsite backup and web hosting.  Another area of specialization is disaster recovery and business continuity planning. 

Abigail Ransonet, founder of the Abacus Data Exchange, usually spends her days helping businesses prepare to handle disaster, but today she is busy testing her own disaster recovery plan.  “At 7AM our building had 25% of our roof ripped off and we lost all electric power” said Abigail, “but we were able to immediately switch to our own emergency plan and recovery generation so that our customer’s data and business operations were continuously protected.” 

Lafayette Utilities System’s municipal fiber optic network supplies the Abacus Data Exchange with enhanced broadband services. In spite of extremely heavy wind damage to the Oil Center’s power grid and support system the fiber optic delivery to the building never went down.  Abacus’ customers did loose their Internet connections for 30 minutes while a generator failover was triggered. 

In the busy first hours after the storm, Bryan Fuselier, Senior Consulting Engineer to Abacus received a call from Greg McElheran, CEO of Liquid Computing. Liquid Computing is the Canadian firm that developed and manufactures the fabric computing system used by Abacus.  After being reassured that all systems were operational, McElheran expressed excitement that Liquid’s data-center-in-a-box had weathered the unexpected disaster with such success.  The Abacus Data Exchange is the first broadband service provider in the world to deploy the new technology in business-to-business applications. 

As Ransonet and her systems engineer moved through the dark building wearing miner’s style LED head-lights on their visors, she made the comment, “Today I feel that we are giving a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘data mining’.”  Now, when she talks to clients about disaster recovery and continuity planning, she will be speaking from first-hand experience.