There are a thousand criteria to account for when selecting a disaster recovery (DR) site. The number of miles from your DR site to your production site and meeting your application recovery time objectives (RTO) are just some of the variables that companies try to address. Now add "Create a movable DR site just in case" to the list.

This week, Tidewater's Director of Information Technology, John Chaffe, spoke up while attending Compellent's C-Drive user conference in Minneapolis, Minn. John was in the audience on a session on "Doing Disaster Recovery Right" and he described his personal DR experience during a question and answer period at the end of the session.

Tidewater's offices are in New Orleans, La., and it needed to move to its DR site in 2005 before Hurricane Katrina hit. Since Tidewater's secondary DR site was also in New Orleans, it elected to load up the company's production systems into two SUVs and move them to a site out of the hurricane's path. They selected Houston as the new DR site.

Aside from the stress of moving the computer equipment and transforming a Houston strip mall office into an operational data center, John faced the same challenge less than a month later. Hurricane Rita formed in the Atlantic and headed straight for Houston which forced him to once again box up and move Tidewater's entire data center to another site.

Tidewater's choice of a using a DR site so close to its production site probably was not the best choice but no foolproof method exists to protect yourself when lightning (or hurricanes) strike twice. In these circumstances, performing a disaster recovery using tapes, servers and an SUV is not elegant but it is one that a company might want to keep in their back pocket.

Jerome Wendt is the president and lead analyst at DCIG Inc. You may read his blogs.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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