Hurricanes Boost Hosted Storage

Hosted storage and services are becoming increasingly popular with users in the hurricane-ravaged southeastern U.S. in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Many IT managers are now attempting to plan for the unthinkable and have totally revamped their storage and server infrastructures. That has served them well as they confronted more recent storms such as Ike and Gustav.

"I think that probably the most important thing that we have done is that we have moved to an Application Service Provider(ASP) model wherever possible," said Peggy Villars-Abadie, executive director of IT for the New Orleans Parish School Board, explaining that the organization's digital lesson planning and critical "Blackboard" system are both hosted elsewhere. Blackboard, which is an academic Web portal, is hosted by a Washington-based company of the same name, and Villars-Abadie explained that the Board's ERP systems are hosted by Maine-based Tyler Technologies.

After the devastation wrought by Katrina, Villars-Abadie and her staff have thrown their weight behind hosted storage, servers, and services. Three years ago, the school board lost a massive chunk of its hardware to the floodwaters and the ensuing chaos, a scenario that Villars-Abadie is desperate to avoid repeating.

"The devastation that the school board experienced, not just from the storm but [also from] the ensuing political upheaval, made everyone open to new ideas," she said. "[It's] the nightmare of not having access to the information because it's dependent on our ability to reach the physical infrastructure."The exec told Byte and Switch that the school board now uses data centers in locations as far flung as Maine, Baltimore, San Diego, and Illinois.

"They are all over the place," she said. "None of them are in the hurricane area all our storage is at their sites, we don't keep any of that here."

The next major piece of IT infrastructure to be moved off-site is the school board's student information system, which Villars-Abadie admits has caused some unease, particularly amongst teachers.

"There was a little nervousness around that initially, but people that work in our data center were confident with it going off-site," she explains. "I said 'We don't have anything more critical than our financial information, and that's stored off-site.'"

Even before the ravages of the recent hurricane season, many organizations in the most vulnerable parts of the southern U.S. were looking for alternatives to their current IT infrastructure, according to Denver-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) company ITonCommand."Companies are getting out of the southeast," said CEO Jonathan Smith, explaining that doctors’ offices and health care organizations, in particular, are looking to host their applications and storage off-site. "There’s a lot of Web applications coming in from the medical space – this means that these doctors, if the hurricane comes through, still have all their stuff."

Denver-based ALN Medical Management, which is a partner of ITonCommand, told Byte and Switch that firms in states such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, have been re-evaluating their technology infrastructures for some time now, well before the recent problems in the region.

"One of our customers is in South Texas, and one of the reasons why they like this is they are getting all their information off the coast, and to a part of the country that's out of the reach of hurricanes," said Eliot Payson, the CIO of ALN Medical Management. "We have got another [customer] in Louisiana, that's the same thing."

The exec explained that many medical firms would much rather outsource the storage capacity and server horsepower required to run key systems such as electronic medical records and billing.

"I think it's the push towards everybody running an electronic patient record and the fact that these systems involve a lot of complexity," added Payson. "ITonCommand provides the storage and the infrastructure, and we handle the application layer."0