A Clarion Call

A Clarion Call

By now many of you have surely read about the T-Mobile/Danger disaster recovery incident. In short, T-Mobile, and their data partner Danger (a Microsoft subsidiary), were undertaking an upgrade of their storage infrastructure. And as sometimes happens, things didn’t go as planned, and the companies experienced some dramatic data loss (including all of the personal data stored on their customers’ Sidekick mobile devices.) It appears that by now, Danger has recovered “a majority” of the data, but not until after days of seeming like all was lost.

This incident brings to mind some important questions for us all: how much data loss is acceptable for your organization (what is your recovery point objective, or RPO)? And how much downtime – time without access to your most critical data – is acceptable for your organization (what is your recovery time objective, or RTO)? Have you thought about these standards for your organization before a disaster occurs? Have you ensured that your current data and application protection platform meets those standards? And most importantly, have you practiced a recovery – ideally on a very regular basis – to ensure that you can actually achieve the results you’re looking for?

For far too many organizations, the answer to all of the above is “no,” and that’s incredibly frightening. We can only hope that public displays of the consequences of answering no to any of those questions, as seen with T-Mobile and Danger this past week, serve as motivation for those answering no to change course, before it’s their names in the headlines.

Industry News

Thoughts on the T-Mobile/Danger Disaster Recovery Failure

T-Mobile, along with its “sidekick” Danger (which is a subsidiary of Microsoft), experienced nothing short of a disaster this past week. It started out innocently enough – with a plan to upgrade the storage infrastructure for T-Mobile’s popular Sidekick device. But things did not go as planned, and many now believe that T-Mobile and Danger were unprepared.

Which Data is Important?

Losing data, any data, is a big deal and should not be taken lightly. Customers trust that companies they deal with will back up and secure their data. Neither administrators nor security professionals have the right to determine, especially after a data loss, say, what is
important and what is not.

Using Hyper-V without re-installing your world

Need to access a Hyper-V machine from your Windows 7 installation? There’s no reason to tear down your machine, re-partition your drive, and reinstall your world. Instead, you can simply install Windows Server 2008 R2 into a .VHD file and make it bootable.

Thin provisioning brings utilization and capacity benefits to data storage, but with a caveat

Introducing thin provisioning technology into existing and new enterprise data storage environments can bring dramatic storage recovery rates and bottom-line savings. Despite its benefits, though, thin provisioning has its drawbacks.

News from AppAssure

Announcing the premium version of DocRetriever for SharePoint

Expanding on the functionality of our free DocRetriever for SharePoint utility, this expanded version of DocRetriever for SharePoint dramatically simplifies the process of restoring individual documents, sites, sub-sites and folders. SharePoint Administrators no longer need to spend countless hours rebuilding your entire production database, or worry about deploying a temporary SharePoint recovery farm, just to recover an individual document or list item.

The Other Green – Storage Efficiency and Optimization

When it comes to “green IT,” sometimes the “green” part is just a bonus. In other words, it’s entirely possible that just by improving the efficiency of your existing infrastructure, you can have a positive environmental impact, and see some cost savings in the process as well.

AppAssure Software Selected by AlwaysOn as an OnDC Top 100 Winner

AppAssure Software is proud to announce that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn to receive its OnDC Top 100 designation. AppAssure was selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and global industry experts after meeting a stringent set of criteria, including innovation, market potential and stakeholder value.

Finally this week, another step in my continued effort to ensure IT Pros are including scripting techniques in their toolbox: another edition of Q&A from The Microsoft Scripting Guys. I assure you I have no ulterior motive here other than to break down the barrier that often exists between IT Pros and developers. Scripting helps to bridge the divide, and it can make our lives as IT pros so much easier! If you haven’t experimented with Windows PowerShell yet, I encourage you to use resources like Hey, Scripting Guy to start today.

Have a great week,

-Josh