And that's just the direct cost. The opportunity cost at the provider of real estate services is incalculable, Amble, director of IT at the Jacksonville, Fla.-based company, said last week. Fidelity National Financial insures almost one in three real estate titles nationwide.

"The idea of not having that information accessible is not an option," Amble said.

The company has just completed an internal evaluation of a $25 million storage system it began working on in 2004 to ensure that its data is always available.

Fidelity National had decided to replace the previous EMC Corp. storage systems about two years ago, after it had problems with backups failing and forcing restarts, which ate into production time, he said.

The decision to install new systems was made easier because the organization faced a hard limit with the EMC system: Fidelity was at a point where it would have had to spend several million dollars on a new frame to hold more disks.