HP 3000 managers, even the women, are "belt-and-suspender guys," to use a phrase from the 1980s. They are accustomed to knowing that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong — and being enough of an IT pro to recover. Quickly.

Oh, that the Internet's infrastructure should be so well engineered. On Tuesday a few blocks of San Francisco were without power, intermittently. Within minutes, massive chunks of the Internet was knocked off the wires and wireless channels. Big companies and famous sites. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted the popular sites that were shut down:

LiveJournal and Second Life went dead, AdBrite dimmed, Craigslist became unlisted, the 1Up gaming network went down, Facebook turned blank, Six Apart couldn't get it together, and Yelp was rendered silent.

The outage even hit our NewsWire offices, thousands of miles away, because we host with Six Apart for this blog. Our content is backed up locally, daily, but our performing platform sank into shadow for more than three worrisome hours. Only a story about the blackouts from an InfoWorld site — just a few blocks from the outage — allayed our concerns. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted that

A good-size chunk of San Francisco was powerless for several hours during the middle of the business day, including hosting service 365 Main, which powers many of the Web's most popular sites and which boasts of doubly redundant backup in case of blackouts

HP offered its latest disaster recovery solution in an entertaining video shown at last month's HP Technology Forum. Disaster recovery (DR) can become your only job if something so simple as power gets interrupted. Many HP 3000 veterans now offer this service to the community.