In an impromptu electronic survey, about 10 percent of the audience said they had considered moving their disaster recovery facility due to concerns about natural disasters, and 11 percent blamed natural disasters as a main cause of their downtime.

Few have had to deal with the sort of disaster Glenn Exline, manager of advanced technology for Computer Sciences Raytheon, had to deal with in managing the computer systems for the 45th Space Wing of the U.S. Air Force, the IT department of which Raytheon manages on a consulting basis: In 1993, a Delta rocket blew up 13 seconds off the pad, raining flaming rocket chunks on a server farm and destroying it.

In fact, it was disaster recovery that led the wing, which is responsible for Patrick Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral, both on the Florida Atlantic coast, to implement a SAN four years ago, Exline said. The two bases, about 22 miles apart, replicate data between each other's EMC Corp. Clariion storage arrays using EMC's MirrorView software. In addition, backup tapes are vaulted in an Iron Mountain facility in Orlando, he said.

While both bases are in Florida, and thus vulnerable to hurricanes, the group assumes that one will survive. "In a true worst case, where neither survives, the last thing anyone is going to be worrying about is where Exchange is," Exline said.

In addition to hurricanes ' which, as numerous speakers pointed out, at least give you warning ' the part of Florida where the bases are located gets more lightning strikes than almost anywhere else in the country: 12 per square kilometer per year, which adds up to 768 strikes per year, Exline said.