What's more, the tape system gobbled a significant amount of network resources, and since the 2000-room hotel is a 24/7 business, it was difficult to find a time to back up a server without sacrificing overall performance, Forelli says.

In 2006, three years after the resort opened, management decided to virtualize its Windows servers using VMware and speed backup and recovery tasks with replication software from Double-Take Software.

Double-Take replicates application data from 77 virtual production machines to a single physical disaster recovery target and will failover to the target (automatically switch over to the backup system) in the event of an outage. When the reserve system is activated, the appropriate application services are started within a corresponding virtual machine at the disaster recovery site and users are automatically redirected, says Forelli.

Because the software looks at data on the byte level and replicates incrementally, there's less bandwith pressure on the network. "It's automatic, it's quick, it's under the covers," he says.

That simplicity is one reason why virtualization is becoming so popular for disaster recovery. "Windows systems are miserable to recover," says Donna Scott, an analyst with Gartner.

At Hancock, Katrina's lesson that virtualization equals faster recovery, along with a corporate desire to cut hardware and power costs, convinced the company to move much of its operations to a virtualized environment (with the exception of a mainframe-based banking system). The bank replaced 55 physical servers with five blade servers running VMware infrastructure, saving $150,000 in server hardware capital costs alone, says Milliet. There, is however, a potential downside. "We have a lot of eggs in one basket. One bad motherboard can take out a lot of virtual machines at one time," he says. To avoid that disaster, Hancock uses software that will automatically switch the VM workload to another physical server if trouble is detected.

For companies struggling to ship large amounts of data across the network, WAN optimization can improve day-to-day performance and speed backup and recovery operations as well.

Cubist Pharmaceuticals was using a traditional disaster recovery model that involved backups to tape, a day or more of travel time to the recovery site, at times a wait for available machines and then a cumbersome restore. "Boring, static, not flexible," comments Michael Geldart, senior manager of computer operations at the company's headquarters, in Lexington, Mass.

Geldart was not only concerned about his disaster recovery strategy, he was also struggling with the large amount of data the company needed to move between headquarters and its facility in Italy.