Jun. 8--Roland Garcia knows all about protecting critical data.

When Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992, water damage ruined film and art files at his marketing firm, Original Impressions. Since then, his company has gone digital, and these days he protects his company's vital information from severe weather by storing it where even Category 5 winds can't touch it.

"Every year you look at your expenses and you go down the line," Garcia says. "And this is one that I would never, I hope, have to remove."

Original Impressions backs up all of its data in the same place as Bacardi USA, Deutsche Telecom and US Southern Command. It's a colorful building in downtown Miami run by Miami-based Terremark.

Think of it as a computer fort: a well defended shelter with seven-inch-thick walls, armed security, biometric access points and enough fuel to survive two weeks without FPL.

"There's no single event that would take out this entire facility," says Terremark vice president Kendall Peterson. 'We utilize the 'defense-in-depth' mentality. . . . Any one failure would not render this building inoperable."

MAINTAINING CONTROL

Providers like Terremark offer what's called colocation: housing a client's servers in a hardened structure while leaving control of the servers in the client's hands. Consumers may be satisfied backing up their files on an external hard drive, but some companies with mission-critical data are opting for a lot more protection in the face of a hurricane.

Terremark also houses the Network Access Point of the Americas, which Peterson says handles 95 percent of Web traffic to Latin America. It's one of the few places in the world where servers can access the Internet directly without going through a service provider. The building's first-floor loading dock is recessed into the ground, so that catastrophic floodwaters would flow down into it -- and away from the data centers on higher floors.

Storm damage has even impacted some colocation providers, including Fort Lauderdale-based 1Vault. The company left Boca Raton after Hurricane Wilma ruined the building where it leased space. Generators failed; support staff was nowhere to be found. Three days offline was enough to drive 1Vault to a windowless, nondescript complex near Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport.

Like Terremark, 1Vault's mantra is redundancy: being prepared for multiple failures at once. Power supply may be the most critical concern.

"We have 20,000 gallons of fuel," says 1Vault vice president Kevin Bly. "We could run for 14 days. We have three generators; we only need one. . . .