The big year for hurricanes for the 45th Space Wing was 2004, when it got hammered by three storms, Exline said. The group not only shut everything down but pulled the servers and storage out of the racks and moved them upstairs to the third floor, in a room with no windows, and moved them back when the storm was over. Everything was back up four hours later, he said.

Hurricanes aren't a big problem in Canada but hurricane Katrina acted as a wake-up call for the Peterborough, Ontario, school district, especially after the area suffered two floods, said Anthony Brice, manager of technical systems for Kawartha Pine Ridge School. The district set up a 3TB SAN with a Thunder 9570V midrange modular storage array from Hitachi Data Systems Inc. and is working on setting up a wireless replication system with the board of the Peterborough Victoria Catholic school district, which he hopes to have planned by Christmas, he said.

Matt Pittman, director of enterprise systems for Penson Financial Services, implemented a disaster recovery plan for the Dallas company to be able to offer rapid recovery to its financial clients in minutes rather than hours, he said. The company ended up choosing Xiotech Corp. for its SAN and CommVault Systems Inc. for its backup and replication software, he said. There is a second site outside Dallas and the two sites replicate synchronously, he said. In addition, he said, he is considering setting up a third site in a more distant location, such as New York or Montreal, and adding asynchronous replication to that one. The new system has also decreased his backup times by 50 percent, he said.

Ruden McCloskey, a law firm with locations in 10 Florida cities, has also been dealing with disaster recovery, said IT director Ben Weinberger. After four hurricanes in 2004 knocked out power for days, he needed a better solution. Plus, tape backup was taking more than 30 hours, he said.

The organization ' which had been set up in a hub-and-spoke configuration with Fort Lauderdale and Tampa acting as hubs ' instead set up a network using multiprotocol label switching, including a disaster recovery site in Chicago, using WANSyncHA software from XOSoft Inc., now owned by CA Inc., Weinberger said. Fort Lauderdale can fail-over to Chicago and then fail back when the emergency is over, he said.