Monday, October 12, 2009

Thoughts on the Sidekick fiasco

... What a fiasco. I can only feel sorry for the sysadmin team in charge of the data at Danger, is this due to their incompetence or simply pressure to deliver? We'll probably never know. But some heads will be rolling for sure, Microsoft will be associated with this mess for years to come, and this might be the end of their foray with the smartphone. This is another one of these data loss event that will go down in history. It's also a strong point against the Cloud, for anyone thinking about outsourcing their data.

It seems to have all happened during a "SAN upgrade". When you update anything on your SAN, you better have a DR site ready, and stop your replication before doing the upgrade. And that doesn't give you the luxury of not backing up your data correctly, which these guys at Danger didn't seem to be doing.

I won't start bashing any particular vendor in this blog, if you're interested in finding out who the rumors point to, I'll let you do your own search. No, it is not HP, but it's not far either. I can't give details, but it's not the first time I hear about a "routine" firmware update on a storage array that goes south. Yes, it is true that SANs are supposed to be upgradable online. But the more and more I think of it, the more I'm comparing the firmware update of a disk array to upgrading the thrusters of a jet while it's in the air. Yes, a jumbo jet can fly while one of the motors is stopped, but would you put your life at stake flying during an upgrade unless you really needed to? I wouldn't.

O.

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