There's a big hole in North Bay's plans to develop a high-tech economy. The Hole is being shielded from close scrutiny, but this hasn't stopped the Northern Ontario city's mayor from talking about it.

The Hole is what folks in North Bay call the Canadian North American Air Defence (NORAD) Regional Sector Air Operations Centre (R/SAOC). The operations centre is currently located in an underground complex at 22 Wing, CFB North Bay and will be relocated to an above ground complex over the next few years, possibly as early as 2006.

The Department of National Defence describes the facility as "providing tactical level command and control to NORAD's primary missions, which include air sovereignty, integrated tactical warning and attack assessment, and aerospace defence. In additional to its primary NORAD roles, R/SAOC is responsible for helping civil authorities protect and sustain national interests."

North Bay Mayor Vic Fedeli, however, calls it a great business opportunity, pitching the property and its potential as the only bombproof underground data storage facility in the world.

While the loss of data was hardly the most important impact of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, it did underscore the importance of secure data storage. According to one estimate, economic losses due to the loss of data in that catastrophic event totaled some US$60 billion.

As the frontline moves from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, it seems somehow appropriate that the heavily fortified facility in North Bay, Ontario should be transformed into the ultimate data storage facility.

To get to this underground three-story granite-encased facility, one has to take a two-kilometer journey 700 feet beneath the Canadian Shield to get to a metre-thick blast-proof entrance.

Built to withstand a nuclear attack, the facility is designed to be self-sustaining. That includes a series of failsafe backup electricity systems.

Fedeli notes that that the largest fibre-optic data pipe owned by Bell Canada in Ontario actually runs right into the facility.

"It makes perfect sense for this facility to be used for data storage," says Fedeli.

"The municipality won't be directly involved in the data storage business. We want to sell or lease the site to someone who is in this business or who wants to be in this business. We'll work as a partner to get it up and running and then get out of the way," he notes

Although it's possible for companies to store data in other buildings, North Bay is proposing a site as a unique facility that can withstand a 9/11 type of catastrophe," he says. "Until we're challenged, we'll call it the world's most secure data storage facility."

Indeed, data storage and retrieval has become a major operational priority for business in the 21st Century. Loss of access to data, even for a few hours, due to terrorism, virus attacks on servers and networks, and power outages can have a serious impact on a business or institution.

Many organizations are scrambling to develop disaster recovery plans to recover their assets, which include people, facilities, business applications, processes and IT systems, so they can return to normal business operations as soon as possible, should a "disaster" occur.

A major incentive south of the border is the Sarbanes-Oxley act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 2002 to force companies into better corporate governance, requires corporations to keep meticulous records amounting to terabytes of electronic data for each organization.

"In a post-9/11, post-Sarbanes-Oxley world, organizations are expected to store data in greater quantities and retrieve it faster," states Fedeli, "and we are absolutely set up for that."

Data storage and disaster recovery is one of the hot topics to be addressed at the first annual Ontario R&E Summit, in Toronto June 14 and 15.

IT officials from several Ontario colleges and universities are gathering for a "Birds of a Feather " session, to explore the possibility of collaborating over the new ORION high speed fibre optic network, to implement a shared solution for data storage or disaster recovery, among other potential collaborative uses of the network.