Diaster Recovery Seeing Resurgence

"For many businesses, disaster recovery means a box of tapes stored on top of the server," Allen said.

As more clients understand the business sense of planning for disaster, solution providers and start-ups are leaping into the market.

Vistastor, which launched last November, is offering a suite of consulting and integration services aimed at helping clients of all sizes design and implement business continuity and disaster recovery, said Glenn Jacobsen, president of the Broomfield, Colo.-based company.

"We've found that SMBs are not really looked at by IBM Global Services and companies like that because they are deemed to be too small," he said.

Vistastor also offers storage planning, assessment, and design; network services; and training for business continuity and SANs.

The services are packaged with a fixed fee and time frame, Jacobsen said. "That way, there's no consultant hanging around for a long time," he said.

Vistastor also is looking for partners interested in reselling or rebranding its services, Jacobsen said.

Callisma, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of networking professional services, recently added business continuity, disaster recovery and storage networking to its services roster. The company focuses on helping large clients with a storage infrastructure,or even a business-continuity or disaster-recovery program,already in place optimize those programs, said George Orlov, the company's CTO.

Most disaster-recovery programs remain at a simple level because a complete traditional program using a mirrored hot site can be prohibitively expensive, Orlov said.

Callisma instead takes advantage of the fact that most clients already have multiple data centers, and works with existing network infrastructures to cross-replicate data between those centers, Orlov said.

"We're not developing new software, but connecting everything together so it works seamlessly," he said.