Although the physical buildings of the businesses were left relatively untouched, the wide-spreading fires made too dangerous in some cases for employees to commute to work, which could hindering the productivity of some companies.

Backup storage provider Overland Storage (overlandstorage.com) and software as a service provider Kintera (kinterainc.com) both turned to their respective contingency plans during the fires.

Overland Storage employees worked from their homes via secure VPN and a company-wide Intranet, and communicated from home phones rerouted from their direct office phone lines. Additionally, the company's UK tech support team helped respond to calls within the United States.

Kintera's business continuity plan consisted of a fault-tolerant system and redundant data centers that ran independent of its primary San Diego location. The company also deployed employees to additional data centers so it could rapidly switch primary operations from San Diego.

At Malibu's Pepperdine University campus, bushfires came within 100 feet of the university's data center. The institution had a contingency in place for such threats, which included routinely sending its backup tapes to storage services provider Iron Mountain (ironmountain.com).

Once the Pepperdine IT staff got word of the fire, it moved its latest tape backup copies to a fireproof safe, shut down the ERP applications, and removed and safely stored its hard drives, all in 35 minutes. The university never went offline.

While their impact on IT was certainly not servere (particularly in comparison to their devastating impact overall), the wildfires in Southern California have given facility designers and engineers cause to consider data centers with more effective fire defense systems, particularly for those facilities located in high-risk areas.

Although most data centers are equipped with basic internal fire suppression systems, this sort of protection is ineffective against a fire that burns its way into the data center. Once it penetrates the server room, such a fire becomes uncontrollable and more threatening than ever.

Some of the alternatives for supplementing a basic fire suppression system were made more relevant by incidents such as the close call at Pepperdine.

FIRELOCK (firelock.com), for instance, manufactures Class 125 fireproof modular vaults. The system uses ceramic fiber to keep the temperature inside at below 125 degrees Fahrenheit, the point at which data is destroyed. The company says the fires made its products particularly relevant to service providers in regions where there is a risk of fire.

While the California wildfires may not have done damage outright to any Web hosting services, they may have shifted the way service providers think about protecting their facilities from fires.