A panel of users at this week"s Storage Networking World in Orlando said they are either having difficulty funding disaster recovery projects or are rethinking how they protect data to better ensure 100 percent reliability in restoring systems in case of a disaster.

Al Todd, senior vice president of the IT services division at Pacific Capital Bancorp. said his company is changing its disaster recovery plan by moving from an outsourced provider with a backup facility in Philadelphia to an in-house site that will be about 240 miles away from his primary data center in Santa Barbara, Calif. Todd would not name his current service provider, saying only that it"s a "well-known, leading" vendor.

"Our main concern was, what if you have a disaster and you have some other banks coming into that site at the same time? Who gets first dibs? I want it to be me. It"s probably not going to be me," he said. "We made a decision over this [past] two-year period to bring our disaster recovery in-house. Our disaster recovery site will now be 240 miles away. I think that"s a good geographical distance apart from Santa Barbara."

IT managers indicated disaster recovery is a top issue. In an impromptu electronic poll of attendees yesterday on what projects have been cost-justified by executives but not necessarily approved, 55 percent pointed to business continuity and disaster recovery projects. Another 25 percent cited tiered storage architecture projects, while 11 percent pointed to virtualization technologies. Only 6 percent said enterprise content management efforts were seen as important enough to warrant funding, and just 3 percent said that about information life-cycle management projects.

Jon William Toigo, founder and senior analyst at Toigo Partners International LLC in Dunedin, Fla., said disaster recovery is rarely a front-burner issue for IT organizations. It"s more often an insurance policy without a return on investment, which is why such projects can be so difficult to fund.