It is a hot August morning in Florida. The humidity is already high as the sun struggles to climb above thick cloud cover. Over the Atlantic, winds kick up random patterns of whitecaps. Two miles inland, in a modest residential neighborhood, Louis Garrida is getting ready to go to work at his building supply store...

Let's face it, a sudden power outage can visit a heap of bad juju on your data. To prevent such visitations, IBM offers a variety of products and services that provide diverse layers of protection against the vicissitudes of technology and nature. Residents in many parts of the country endure electrical storms, unreliable public utilities and other disruptions to the dependable flow of electricity. If a predictable power supply is indispensable to computing, so then are the devices that help ensure it.

The IBM Battery Power Unit is designed to span brief power outages and to allow an orderly shutdown of your system during extended power failures. If power is not restored after four minutes, the unit automatically executes a memory dump to disk. There is good and bad news in that. The good news is that a memory dump can save your work; the bad news is that the AS/400 is the only thing that can read it. The unit comes as a standard feature on D and later 9406s and is optional on the 9402 and 9404.

...Garrida arrives at work, a smallish cinder-block building with a large paved lot surrounded by a high, chain-link fence. Several customers are already waiting. He opens the thick Yale padlock and slides back the gate. Piles of lumber and hundreds of sheets of plywood are stacked in neat rows. He unlocks the office, moves quickly to the back room and powers up the AS/400. The point- of-sale terminals spring to life. Back in the yard, Garrida looks up. The sky is darkening and the wind is flexing the tops of nearby palm trees...

The next level in power protection for the AS/400 is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Typically, any UPS system will provide about 10-15 minutes of backup battery power in case of a blackout. But more battery packs can be added to the unit if additional time is required.

The Smart-UPS series, manufactured by APC, offers reliability up to 5000VA, and the AS/400 interface kit-included in the price of purchase-is able to perform unattended system shutdowns. The unit protects against brownouts and lightning surges, and includes a battery self-test which issues an automatic replacement warning. APC provides up to a five-year warranty and backs it with a $25,000 lifetime protection guarantee.

For state-of-the-art technology and superlative reliability, Fortress UPS offers a unit that boasts a mean time between failures of more than 11 years. That means the unit will likely be doing its job long after you've quit doing yours.

...The wind rises to a steady howl and it is raining. Helping people load plywood panels onto their trucks is tricky business. The wide surface of the panels catches gusts like a sail. Garrida helps when he can but customers vie for his attention, anxious to return to their homes and businesses to begin boarding up windows. Over the Atlantic, what was a tropical depression has now become a tropical storm...

Beyond ensuring uninterrupted power, LEA Dynatech manufactures a device which provides transient voltage and electronic noise protection not only for system power lines but also for communication lines. The Klean-Line Electronic Filter has a feature called Transient Eliminator (TE) that ensures phone and data lines are free of even the fastest transients whether caused by lightning, AC power induction or electrostatic discharge. Individual TE units protect the integrity of devices communicating with the AS/400 via twinax, RS-232, dial-up, leased lines or Ethernet.

...The stacks of plywood are almost gone, as are the customers. Louis Garrida prepares to lock up. For several hours now, radio bulletins have urged residents to evacuate the city. Outside, the wind continues to push sheets of rain across a darkened landscape. A tree bends, then sags atop a power line. The lights blink, then die. Garrida adjusts to the darkness and locates a flashlight under the counter. He collects the day's receipts and is about to leave when he turns and makes his way to the back room. He stuffs his last set of AS/400 backup tapes into the bank bag and hurries to his car...

Sometimes, however, even the most careful precautions cannot assuage nature's ire. Recent earthquakes in northern California, fires in the southern part of that state and floods in the Midwest suggest the need for even greater precaution. IBM's Business Recovery Services offer 13 hot sites across the country with state-of-the-art computing facilities and expert technical staffs to assist customers in times of disaster. Customers can bring their IS staff and backup tapes to the recovery facility, or IBM will ship your hardware configuration to the location of your choice. Hot sites are located in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, Philadelphia, Seattle, Sterling Forest (New York), Tampa and Washington, DC.

...Traffic is snarled but moves slowly inland as Garrida's car is buffeted by rain and gusts of wind approaching 70mph. The wind will soon rise above 120mph. The roof of Garrida's building supply business is eventually ripped away like gift wrap. Inside the cinder-block building, merchandise, racks, counters and a computer are smashed to rubble by a sea cyclone now 500 miles in diameter. The tropical storm is making a name for itself. The tracking center in Atlanta has dubbed it Hurricane Andrew. The town fleeing its manic winds is Homestead, Florida.

Hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed in the path of Hurricane Andrew. But IBM's Business Recovery Services and hot site in Tampa were instrumental in getting businesses up and running after the storm. Returning for his backup tapes allowed Garrida to quickly restore his sales, inventory and accounts receivable data, and eventually reopen his business. Building supplies would take on a new significance in Homestead.

All of these data protection products and services can be purchased from IBM Direct by calling 1-800-IBM-CALL. But if your experience mirrors mine, good luck. When I called to ask a few questions, I was shuffled off to three different people, put on hold a total of eight times and treated to a lot of dull music. An AS/400 specialist finally said she would have to get back to me. She did, but only to give me another 800 number for the manufacturer of one of the products in question. I dialed it, and got a company called Bag and Baggage. At that point, I turned my attention to other things. As we all know, disaster planning is something that can wait until tomorrow.

(The events described are a compilation and compression of events that took place in Homestead, Florida. Names have been changed.)

Victor Rozek has 17 years of experience in the data processing industry, including seven years with IBM in Operations Management and Systems Engineering.

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