S1, a vendor of banking and financial services software, hosts systems for some of its customers and has service-level agreements with them requiring annual tests of its disaster recovery procedures. But Holdburg said that because of the heavy demand for hot-site space at SunGard's facilities after the hurricanes, S1 risked not being able to complete the mandated tests.

Consequently, the company decided to reopen its disaster recovery contract and call in other vendors to bid against SunGard. It ended up choosing Houston-based VeriCenter Inc., which proposed a hybrid hot-site/in-house solution that provided S1 with a dedicated 3,000-square-foot caged area at a data center in Dallas. S1 supplies its own equipment and can run tests whenever it wants, Holdburg said. "It's ours to do whatever we please with," he noted.

What's more, even after buying the IT gear, S1 expects to save $1.5 million over three years because of the switch, according to Holdburg. That is a result of both reduced hardware costs and the tendency of disaster recovery vendors to overprovision their facilities and then pass the costs on to customers, he said.

One caveat, though, is that users of a service such as VeriCenter's need to have trained staffers available to support their systems, Holdburg said.

The city of Tallahassee, Fla., is also considering dropping its SunGard hot-site service. "Right now, we will take our tapes, get on an airplane and head to Philadelphia," where a SunGard facility is located, said Don DeLoach, Tallahassee's CIO. But it may take longer than 48 hours to restore operations, and DeLoach said he wants a faster recovery process and the ability to get his IT employees out of harm's way as soon as possible.