Yesterday's major earthquake that hit the Seattle area most probably had many Internet CTO's from other high risk earthquake cities taking notes. Industry movers and shakers like Real Networks had to face the challenge of providing uninterrupted services while at the same time taking necessary safety precautions for employees.

Attention was definitely focused on Seattle's Pioneer Square district, an area that suffered the most damange due to the older buildings in that area. The Cobalt Group, which provides Internet services to the automative industry, occupies 75,000 square feet in a renovated 1916 cold storage building in Pioneer Square.

Although, the company's headquarters suffered some structural damange, the company was able to continue service to its some 13,000 automotive dealer clients.

"Cobalt currently serves over one million Web pages per day for our dealer clients and this earthquake put our systems to the test," says CEO John Holt.

Cobalt's Web site and database servers are located at an off-site earthquake proof facility operated by Seattle-based Internap. A smart move considering that the company has invested more than $8 million in its server and database farm, which provides real-time redundancy and load balancing for client Web sites.

Approximately 400 of Cobalt's 600 employees were in the building at the time of the earthquake. All employees were immediately evacuated and customer service was relocated to a new facility.

Internet companies in Redmond were also quite prepared. Seattle.internet.com has learned that Redmond-based NetUPDATE's Web-based transaction management product for mortgage professionals, LoanUPDATE, remained up and running through the quake.

According to the company's Director of Information Technology Ian Beer, his company has been preparing for events like yesterday's earthquake. "Our collocation facility in Seattle has been hardened against earthquake damage and we've built redundancy into our systems. In a worst-case scenario, we can move our applications to a set of standby servers at our Redmond location in under 15 minutes. Moreover, we have an ongoing project to provide standby servers on the east coast of the US in the event of a massive event affecting the west coast," says Beer.

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