Have you seen the first storm of the season? Not tropical depression Alberto, but the flood of ads from companies leveraging hurricane hysteria to sell various data protection services. In contrast to the torrent of pushy ads in poor taste, this is the story of a small company in New Orleans, servers in Dallas, and how YP Solutions managed to keep working in spite of Hurricane Katrina.
Technically in Metairie, Louisiana, the 30 employees of YP (Yellow Pages) Solutions (now part of Local Matters, Inc., www.localmatters.com) worked just across the 17th Street Canal from New Orleans proper. Providing Internet Yellow Pages, directory assistance, and local search market content, YP Solutions provides products that are completely computerized and in many cases virtual, such as local directory databases for directory assistance operators.
Computers aren't just helpful at YP Solutions, computers hold the entire company's value on their hard disks. No computers, no business.
Enter Hurricane Katrina. Employees were told to evacuate before Katrina devastated New Orleans on Monday, August 29th. On Tuesday, August 30th, YP Solutions employees continued with their work, even though they were scattered from Connecticut to Utah. While FEMA fumbled and the levees broke, YP Solutions continued business as usual.
Offsite production environment hosting
Mistral IT (.com) offers remote data backup services under the name Global Data Vault (they bought GDV in March of 2006). They also offer application hosting, the service used by YP Solutions.
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