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There is a larger issue to deal with here. If you are concerned about the statistical likelihood of your site being down due to a national disaster, you better deploy a geographically diverse configuration. Yes, there are plenty of places where hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes can occur... but you can't forget floods, plane crashes or car bombs. If your business needs to be up 100% of the time, you have no choice but to deploy a two-site location and configure replication as needed to meet your business rules. :-)

Hi Paul, I agree - but building two red-zone data centers is still higher risk than two green-zone ones, no? Of course, there are lots of other factors to consider. For instance, check out Liam's recent post on data center operating costs, which vary widely across locations.

http://www.thewhir.com/blogs/liam-eagle/index.cfm/2007/1/11/The-Cheapest-Places-to-Build-Data-Centers

Many of the companies looking for data centers in disaster-free zones often have at least one primary facility that, for business purposes, needs to be in either New York or an earthquake-sensitive California city. So it's often a case of looking for a "green zone" case to minimize business risk represented by the "red zone" primary center.

Maybe that's where "container colo" might come in handy? Instead of building red zone data centers in fixed locations, you get a bunch of Blackboxes from Sun. That way, in the worst case they can be air-lifted out if your current location is cut off from power or Internet access.

Disaster recovery data centers are often part of a broader program to address regulatory mandates for data security. For instance, financial regulators want Wall Street firms to locate secondary data centers far enough away that they will survive a "regional event" that affects the primary data center. I don't know that a Blackbox in the parking lot (or on a rooftop in NYC, as imaged by one of the Sun pictures) will keep the regulators happy. The other issue is that 9-11 made companies consider DR plans that need to work if air travel is grounded - a scenario which would make a Blackbox airlift problematic.

I love being in Lansing Michigan :) Cheap power too.