Throughout Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, Hurricane Gustav disrupted thousands of businesses, but for clients of online backup provider Data Protection Services (DPS) it was business as usual. DPS had guided, during Hurricane Katrina, its New Orleans data center through weeks of power outages, no water, and martial law with no downtime.

Jeff Danos, DPS CEO, declared: "Before Hurricane Katrina, our disaster plans were just that - plans, but successfully managing that event gave us unique insight into what we could do to raise our company to an even higher level of preparedness." Implementation of improvements began immediately after the storm.

DPS moved its primary data center from New Orleans to Hammond, LA, dollowing Hurricane Katrina, because accessibility had proven to be a major obstacle. Featuring two auxiliary power generation systems, each with dual fuel sources, the new data center was designed with a complete fault-tolerant infrastructure. The new primary facility features redundant fiber optic connections from multiple vendors accessing from disparate directions, and redundant capacity systems. Secondary data centers were established in Atlanta, GA, and recently in Dallas, TX. The level of redundancy, with each of these data centers designed to assume primary status if failure is encountered at the primary site, sets a high standard that few, if any other, online backup providers even approach.

The first real test of DPS's new facility and improved disaster preparations was Hurricane Gustav. Everything worked flawlessly. Danos added: "We were so well-prepared that the disaster teams of both DPS and our partner, Server Armory, were concerned that we had so little to do to prepare." As soon as utility power failed, the company automatically switched to generated power and will continue to run on generated power until utility power is restored. DPS technicians and managers kept the company fully staffed 24/7 during the emergency to assist clients and ensure all operations performed as designed. While other businesses throughout the region went dark., DPS experienced zero downtime.