With Hurricane Rita only a harrowing memory for IT managers in Texas last week, their mantra for protecting servers, if they didn’t have server replication in place, was largely “back up their data, take them down, cover them up and get out of the building.”

Hurricane Rita slammed Texas businesses Saturday morning and caused the evacuation of 1.3 million people from Gulf Coast cities like Galveston, Corpus Christi and Houston.

Here’s what some IT managers did with their servers prior to Rita’s wrath.

Although Todd Coury, network manager for law firm Andrews Kurth in Houston, didn’t answer his phone or return Network World’s calls, we know that his servers are protected by MessageOne’s OneSwitch service. In a previous interview, Coury said he uses OneSwitch to replicate his Windows applications and data to Dallas.
 
"We are replicating data from Houston to a disaster recovery [storage-area network] in Dallas, so if Houston goes offline, we can continue to work with the Houston data, even if the network is unavailable in Houston," Coury said.
 
“With OneSwitch, I can log in from home or from anywhere and fail over our key systems to our Dallas office," he said. "Before, I would have had to go onsite and fail over our systems.” OneSwitch provides automated replication and failover during a disaster or system failure.

Other IT managers in Houston reported that they were battening down their businesses for Rita’s approach.

James Taylor, IT manager for SPX Valves and Controls in Houston, spent last Wednesday and Thursday preparing for Rita. “We’re doing backups on the server and we push data up to our Charlotte, N.C., location just in case the server gets buried.”

Taylor thought about moving his servers out of the facility, but decided against it.

“Right now trying to get out of Houston is impossible - you really risk getting into a wreck, and the servers are safer here,” Taylor says. “We are going to tie them down, move the low servers to the top of the rack, unplug everything and then cover them up.”

Greg Arnold, CIO for Big Dog Logistics in Houston, chose LiveVault’s InSync vaulting service to protect his servers.

“Starting this evening, we are going to being transferring all our data to some servers in Atlanta," Arnold says.
 
"We put in LiveVault for lots of reasons, Hurricane Allison being one of them,” Arnold says. “Keeping tapes and transferring them around, they get lost and damaged. The Internet being what it is we can transfer data to another location and resume operations from around the world.”