Comarco Inc., a maker of wireless test products in Irvine, Calif., also has its disaster recovery center in Washington State, but for a different reason. Its IT Manager, Sean Anderson, was burned out of his house by wildfires in southern California, and moved to his second home in Spokane, where he works remotely. The company decided last fall that setting up its backup data center in Spokane would be a wise idea. "Since I'm up here and electricity is cheap in Spokane and rental space is cheap, it made sense," Anderson said.

If the company's Irvine building were destroyed, or its employees unable to get to it, weekly backups at an offsite location wouldn't really be practical for disaster recovery. "It didn't make sense to have tapes that couldn't get back to a building that wasn't functional," he said.

At first, Comarco looked at hosted data centers through companies such as SunGard. But the "relatively small" Comarco, with earnings of US$50 million a year, decided that solution was too expensive. "For the kinds of plans they have for the recovery we're interested in, the economics didn't work," Anderson said.

Instead, the company decided to replicate its critical systems, which include ERP on a Solaris system, a SQL database for CRM, engineering source code and Exchange. "I never thought e-mail would be that critical, but it is these days," Anderson said. Comarco considered an iSCSI system from Itransa Inc., with software for asynchronous replication, but because the company saved money by using VMware for virtual servers, the Itransa solution would have been too expensive. That option would have meant buying asynchronous replication software, as well as annual maintenance, for each virtual server.

The company tested products such as WANSyncHA from XOsoft and Double-Take from NSI Software Inc. -- it's now Double-Take Software -- and settled on Double-Take, which it tested in Irvine before moving it to Spokane. However, the Exchange failover didn't work because the Microsoft automated failover tool expected Exchange binaries to be on the target machine. "The Exchange binaries were not on the base machine -- they were on a virtual machine that wasn't running," Anderson said. Fortunately both NSI and Microsoft changed their pricing models around that time to enable users to run software using a single license on up to four virtual machines at no additional cost. "That was music to our ears," he said.