Disaster recovery follows US blackout

The power outage in the US has seen some companies invoke their disaster recovery services.

SunGard, which has about 7,000 disaster recovery clients in North America, said about 30 customers activated their service. But most were interested in getting access to a SunGard-run office with electricity and PCs, said Dan Hamill, SunGard's vice president of operations.

"The main services they're invoking are work-group services," he said.

Companies such as HP, IBM and SunGard promise to help companies keep their data and applications running in the event of disasters such as blackouts and floods. Disaster recovery services range from consulting to data backup at remote sites to dedicated alternative offices and equipment to mobile offices that can roll to a customer's site.

HP has hundreds of disaster recovery customers in the affected region, but just one had declared a disaster and invoked HP's service as of Thursday afternoon, said Brian Fowler, HP's global director for business continuity services.

"Most customers can run their IT on the backup generator for several days," Fowler said.

The one customer tapping HP for its service is in the process of shifting its IT operations to an HP business continuity centre, Fowler said.

In a report last year, market research company IDC said the backup recovery services market would grow from $3bn in 2001 to $4.2bn in 2006, at an annual growth rate of 6.9 per cent. The broader business-continuity market - including software and hardware such as high-availability computers and storage area networks (SANs) - was seen by IDC as expanding from $29.9bn in 2001 to $54.9bn in 2006 - an annual growth of 12.9 per cent.

Ed Frauenheim writes for CNET News.com