VentureTech Members Recount Hurricane Katrina Experience

The two New Orleans-based solution providers shared their Katrina story in an emotional general session to a crowd of about 500. They also demonstrated the need for more effective disaster-recovery planning and how their own best-laid plans were not enough.

“We may have made it through, but it would not have been easy. Thank you,” said Perrier, president of Universal Data. “Every story you hear coming out of New Orleans, there was always a worse story. We were lucky. We still have our businesses, our homes, our families.”

Gremillion, president of Restech, was especially emotional when recounting his memories of not knowing where his families and employees were in the immediate aftermath of Katrina last August.

“It was a very lonely feeling at that point. We had no idea where clients were. Some stark memories in mind are text messaging, ‘Where are you?’ It was like sending out an SOS. ‘Are you OK? Did you make it out?’ ”

Both solution providers said they had long marketed disaster-recovery solutions to customers, but even they were not prepared for something as devastating as Katrina.

“I thought my backup plan would be easy to implement. I had tape backup. Everybody had cell phones. I thought for sure we’d have Internet access wherever we were,” Perrier said. “From a business standpoint, we thought it would be a two-day vacation. Employees would be straggling in. In previous years, people went to different places and would come back when they felt like it.”

The Saturday morning before the storm, Gremillion was boarding up his house when a customer called and asked him to bring the customer’s server to the airport. Gremillion thought he was crazy.

“I said, ‘I’m going to have to charge you three times the normal rate.’ He said do it. So I went into the building, the same building where Jim has his office. I’m pushing a cart full of file servers, and I see Jim in his office and say, ‘Can you believe this? We’re either going to be heroes or idiots.’ ”

In addition to securing their customers’ data and their own data, the solution providers had to deal with the logistical problems of getting out of town.

“Something happened to the psyche of our city when [Hurricanes] Andrew and George came through. We had never evacuated before. There’s a whole new factor of how the city thinks now. When New Orleans activates its plan, it goes in a hundreds-of-miles radius,” Gremillion said. “When do you leave? If you don’t leave early enough, you’re stuck in traffic. You can’t book a hotel within 200 or 300 miles. As that wave [of evacuees] moves out [of the city], they eat all the food, they use all the gas, they use up all the hotel rooms. You run out of resources very quickly.”

After the storm, as the solution providers began helping customers recover, they learned that all things are relative. One client took nine days to get back online, and it was deemed a success, Perrier said.

Gremillion reminded the crowd that a disaster-recovery plan that seems expensive beforehand can be a bargain afterward. “We have one law firm that bills $50,000 a day. So if a $30,000 hardware investment represents less than one day of billing, isn’t that an ROI? When you say a nine-day recovery is successful, that’s a big loss,” he said.

Both men, who received a standing ovation upon leaving the stage, also thanked Ingram Micro and fellow VentureTech members for the equipment, resources and other support they received last fall.