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The heart of a typical disaster-recovery plan is moving data off-site so you can access it after the disaster is over. But what if you can't?

For example, the University of New Orleans (UNO) had stored backup tapes in two separate locations: the school's computer room and the campus security center 5 miles away. Access to the campus and the security center was impossible in the days after the storm. The school was offered space and extra server equipment by a sister school, Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, but getting to its data was problematic.

Eventually, school officials had to use a National Guard convoy to get back on campus and physically recover the tapes. "That's something we do differently now," says Jim Burgard, vice chancellor for university computing and communications at UNO. "We now store our tapes with Iron Mountain, which stores them well away from New Orleans and even beyond Baton Rouge."

Others were luckier. "We preshipped our tapes out of town on Saturday [before the storm], because we had concerns that if it were a big hit, our off-site tape storage provider might not be able to get the tapes out of town on request," Loyola's Jacobs says. "We shipped the tapes early, and now that's part of our official plan. It was a very good call, because the facility where the tapes were stored survived, but we couldn't have gotten to it for weeks."

Tale of the tape

Similarly, the Innovations Group, a firm that consults on the entertainment and hospitality industry, ran into tape troubles. The company has offices in Colorado and New Jersey, and the plan was for employees to fly there and keep working. The company expected to lose use of its data center, but by taking copies of its backup tapes and CDs of its software and software licenses, planned to create a new data center in Colorado, according to Jeremiah Tanger, IT administrator at the firm.

On the Saturday before the storm, Tanger took the backup tapes, which had been refreshed the day before, and tried to evacuate to Jackson, Miss. But Jackson got hit, too, and he decided to drop the tapes off at Kinko's to be overnighted to Colorado.

Three days later the tapes hadn't arrived. He tracked them down, dry and safe at the Kinko's where clerks had failed to send them out before the storm. They sent them that day, and Tanger bought new server hardware to load his applications and data so employees could work remotely using laptops equipped with Cisco VPN gear.

He also hired Iron Mountain to store them outside New Orleans at a site from which they can be delivered to Innovations within four hours. "If we see a storm coming, we can have them ship the tapes to another archive center. It gives us a lot more flexibility," he says.

The Friday before Katrina struck, he had dropped off tapes at a safe deposit box in a bank just a half mile from Innovation Group's offices. The tapes he eventually used to build a new data store in Colorado were fresh copies made the following week. "If I hadn't taken those tapes with me, we wouldn't have had access to that data for three months," Tanger says. That's how long it took before the bank reopened.

New plans, new technologies

Living through a disaster like Katrina has helped enterprises in New Orleans improve their contingency plans. For example, Phelps Dunbar's Rigamer says it helped make him better aware that disaster recovery is "survival mode" and that getting critical systems back online is where he needs to devote resources.

He's also fast-tracked a plan to consolidate the servers from his seven domestic sites into one large vendor-operated data center and plans to make good use of server and storage virtualization technologies to take advantage of economies of scale, cut down on space and power needs, and make recovering from a similar disaster far easier.

"None of our offices are quite large enough to put in a storage-area network of any size or blade server technology. Of course, going into consolidation, that's exactly what we'll have," he says. "The only downside is that your dependency on the network is amplified. And with Katrina, that was a problem -- everyone was hit."