The system is still a work-in-progress. The Exchange failover was turned on in early March, with the engineering source code following later in the month and the SQL Server failover expected by the end of April. For the Solaris-based ERP system, the software is dumped into a replicating server using NFS and another Solaris box located in Spokane, Anderson said.

The two data centers are connected between a T1 line in Spokane and a fractional DS3 in Irvine; The company also uses Riverbed Technology Inc.'s WAN optimization software to improve performance. The transactions are posted to the backup system almost as quickly as to the data center one, Anderson said. "It might be half a second behind." The test Exchange failover takes 13 minutes -- and that includes a 10-minute delay the company configured to keep WAN glitches from triggering a failover.

Like Comarco, Costello & Sons Insurance Brokers Inc. in San Rafael, Calif. also finds e-mail backup critical and uses NearPoint from Mimosa Systems Inc. NearPoint saves Exchange files at the block level, which makes them easier to replicate.

Costello & Sons, which provides liability insurance for technology firms, has a four-part disaster recovery method, said IT director Steven Perry. First, it has redundant servers in the office. "If any one server goes down, we can recover right away," he said. Second, the company backs up everything to tape, which is stored at an offsite location in a bank vault across the bay. Third, everyone uses removable external hard drives.

"For the price of a couple of tapes in the old days when they were $50 each, you can put in 250 [GB]," Perry said. "Our Exchange store is around 60 [GB], the insurance data with all our CRM, which gives us policy information, is around 30 [GB] and our document management system has about 60 [GB]. All of that information could go on one 150 [GB] hard drive."