The first broad-spectrum service lab facility has been opened by Seagate Recovery Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate Technology, at its European headquarters in Amsterdam.

Seagate Recovery Services already operates state-of-the-art lab facilities in the US, Canada, Australia and Asia and this is the first of its kind in Europe.

Bill Watkins, CEO, Seagate, stated: “Over the past three years we have been executing a strategy designed to broaden our customer base and increase growth opportunities by expanding beyond our core hard disc drive business into the broader storage solutions category. The objective for Seagate Recovery Services is to become a leading provider of services to manage and protect our customers’ digital content throughout its lifecycle.”

The new state-of-the-art facility delivers, added value to customers through offering a wide range of services including data migration, eDiscovery, forensics and business continuity and disaster recovery.

Equipped with Class 100 Clean Rooms and Class 10 horizontal flow clean bench environments, the clean-air facilities provide controlled temperature and humidity to protect all recovery equipment and client media from contamination.

Kees Nielen, General Manager at the new facility, stated: “Data is becoming more important and while storing data is vital it is not the only issue. Whether it is a single hard drive, flash, USB, optical, raid system or complex high end tape recovery, we can handle the need.”

Seagate’s lab facility maintains an in-house programming department and an extensive library of specialised equipment to handle all the various types of media it works on, including:
 
•   Over 26,000 drives and over 8,000 unique models
•   PC platforms with additional power supplies, fans, cabling and other accessories
•   Specialised tools for repairing circuit boards
•   Proprietary software utilities which can be modified for use on each unique case
•   Tool-sets and interfaces for non-standard drives such as the Microdrive
•   Combs and forks for working on the head stack and platter assembly
•   System area track-writers
•   SignalTrace™ Technology

In launching the new lab Seagate Recovery Services is aiming to target those organisations, which frequently cite data availability and recovery as the key IT challenge.  For many analyst firms this includes the 74 million small to medium sized businesses worldwide.