Houston Wire & Cable Taps Data Foundry as Disaster Recovery Provider

Austin, TX – Houston Wire & Cable (NASDAQ:HWCC), a major U.S. wire and cable distributor founded in 1975, announced today the choice of Data Foundry as their Disaster Recovery Services provider. Houston Wire & Cable, headquartered in Houston, Texas, will house their critical backup server operations in Data Foundry’s Austin Data Center.

Houston Wire & Cable provides a wide range of specialized wire and cable products to over 8,000 customers in the electrical industry. Houston Wire & Cable uses proprietary applications and the Internet to allow customers to view online product catalogs, inventory and pricing, request quotes, place orders and track shipments via a secure customer portal. Through this state-of-the-art order processing system Houston Wire & Cable stands behind a 100% guarantee of order accuracy and on time delivery to anywhere in the United States. Their ability to serve customers at this pace is dependent on the constant, consistent availability of critical server operations.

“With 11 national distribution centers, an inventory of more than 23,000 products, and 95% of our customers receiving their order the same or next day, our server operations are critical to our goal of providing great customer service and quality products,” said Marilyn McMahon, Director of IT at Houston Wire & Cable. "If there were even a brief period of downtime in our inventory tracking, shipping, purchasing, or any other critical systems, our process would be compromised. This is why all of our systems, from our business applications supporting billing and shipping, to our email system, and even our LAN storage, are now safely backed up in Data Foundry's Austin Data Center."

Though Houston Wire & Cable has always instituted a disaster recovery plan that enabled them to fail over to a national provider, the events around Hurricane Rita caused them to search out a regional recovery plan to supplement the plan they already had in place. “Having a contract with a large national provider just wasn’t good enough when it came to actually implementing and executing the plan. We were concerned about getting our people to the recovery location the national provider chose, which could be as far away as Philadelphia. This was impractical and would cause undue strain on our employees in an already stressful situation. This meant that employees may be separated from their families, who would likely find safety in a more regional location such as Austin,” commented McMahon.

"Houston Wire & Cable is not unique in their concern about the ease and practicality of their disaster recovery plan. We've found that numerous companies are coming to us in search of a plan that will keep their data safe in the region's premiere data center while also allowing them to stay close to their primary site, thus allowing their employees easy transition in the case of a disaster," said Mark Noonan, Vice President of Data Foundry.