Savanna site will house tech-data facility

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By Kay Luna | Monday, August 28, 2006 11:49 PM CDT | () comments

SAVANNA, Ill. — A new data-storage business plans to open soon in several old military bunkers at the former Savanna Army Depot, where another company tried a similar project and failed.

Cyber Vault Technologies Inc. has moved into a building at the former depot, with plans to begin storage operations by January, company chairman and chief executive officer Al Hasan said.

The company expects to hire about 60 employees — and project leaders say that number is much more realistic than the 2,000 workers the defunct project, Savanna Depot Technologies Corp., forecasted in 2003.

“It’s not the 2,000 blue-sky jobs that we had been told about before, but they’re at least 60 good jobs related to the data project,” said David Ylinen, executive director of the Jo-Carroll Local Redevelopment Authority, or LRA. “And there probably will be more than that with some of the other ideas they’re working on.”

The jobs will pay a minimum of $9.91 per hour, Hasan said, but he expects to pay to workers with experience and skills.

What kind of storage will Cyber Vault do? The company’s vice president of corporate services, Tom Schlosser, said it will convert physical documents into digital versions, and store that information on computer servers housed in the old military bunkers.

Cyber Vault also will store other computer data on servers, which Schlosser said will assist companies and other clients — including municipalities — in reducing paper documents in their offices, and backing up their data in case of a disaster.

There will be racks of computer servers stored in the bunkers for this purpose, he said.

For instance, Chicago’s underground tunnels were flooded several years ago, knocking out a lot of computers – and lost a lot of data – in the area. If the companies used a storage facility like the one coming to Savanna, they would have had a “mirror site” to instantly take over, so their services would not be interrupted, Schlosser said.

“New Orleans could have used a lot of backup when Katrina hit, because their data centers were knocked out,” he said. “It would have been beneficial to have remote disaster recovery systems in remote locations, like what we’re going to do.”

Hasan said the company’s “secret sauce” is having a military-grade facility to secure that data, and back it up several times.

This time, Ylinen said the LRA was “a little more due diligent” with screening the new company, after watching the failed first attempt, led by Louis Giokas. He announced the project would hire thousands of workers, but very few people ever were employed with the venture before it died about three years later, Ylinen said.

Giokas could not be reached for comment about what went wrong.

Schlosser, a Clinton resident for the past 35 years, said he was a former shareholder in Giokas’ venture, but exited early on. Hasan, who does not know Giokas, said he believes his company is different, like “night and day,” from the first one.

Cyber Vault recently merged with Chicago-based Lucidline, which already has data storage centers operational in the Chicago area. Those centers will continue operating, but their data will be backed up at the Savanna location — and that’s where most of the company’s business will happen after it opens, Hasan said.

The company and the LRA now are working to bring fiber-optic connections to the site, which is imperative to make the business a success, Hasan added.

Ylinen said he and some LRA board members visited one of the company’s operational centers in Chicago recently, and were quite impressed.

“They really are an active group and they’re really energetic to get it started,” Ylinen said.

The LRA is expected to finalize the lease with Cyber Vault next month, but already gave them short-term use of one of the buildings. The first company finished renovating two of the bunkers before it went under, he added.

The depot closed in 2000, but remains under the Army’s control. Economic development officials have been encouraging new uses for the facility ever since.

When Cyber Vault begins hiring, it will run advertisements in the media to alert the public.

“We’re so excited about this,” Ylinen said. “This is going to put us on the map, and this time, we have folks who have the where-with-all and the necessary business connections to do it.”

Kay Luna can be contacted at (563) 383-2323 or kluna@qctimes.com.