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Sidekick contacts, data gone, T-Mobile says | |
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| Time: 09:00 EST/14:00 GMT | News Source: Yahoo News | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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Owners of Sidekick phones, made by a Microsoft subsidiary and sold by T-Mobile USA, may have lost all the personal data they stored on the phone, including contact numbers. The companies say the data is "almost certainly" gone after a failure of servers operated by Microsoft wiped out the data. The companies said they hoped to update customers on recovery efforts Monday. | ||
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| #1 By 2 (24.239.197.85) at 10/12/2009 9:02:25 AM |
| ouch |
| #2 By 28801 (65.90.202.10) at 10/12/2009 10:26:53 AM |
| Backups? |
| #3 By 15406 (99.240.77.173) at 10/12/2009 10:40:02 AM |
| I smell a class-action lawsuit in the making. MS will try to avert it by offering plaintiffs a copy of Vista. |
| #4 By 37 (192.251.125.85) at 10/12/2009 11:09:32 AM |
| People still use mobile windows crap? |
| #5 By 28801 (71.58.225.185) at 10/12/2009 12:01:05 PM |
| Seriously, Backups? |
| #6 By 17855 (205.167.180.132) at 10/12/2009 1:01:21 PM |
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Check out the latest on Snow Leopard. Who needs the cloud to lose data. :)
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/28388/53/ This post was edited by awiltfong on Monday, October 12, 2009 at 13:02. |
| #7 By 23275 (68.117.163.128) at 10/12/2009 1:26:00 PM |
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man....
here's what I am betting (as I have seen it and helped really big customers resolve it and in some examples, still do manage continuity for large companies where many of you may have shopped quiet often). They had a *nix back end at Danger and did not use a commercial solution to provide for backup and restoration. They relied on the use of TAR files to create a pile of symbolic links that they ASSUMED had them covered ..... right up until they needed it! What does work for people that are most likely to read this site that need to protect pargely Linux boxes is, to run a separate Windows Server (03 or 08) and use CA's BrightStor 11/12. Run UAGENT on the *nix to be protected and run the host and its DB on the Windows Server. For small/med companies, use a Sony AIT 3 to 5 drive depending upon how much you need to protect and run miltiplexing jobs to cover many hosts. For larger enterprises I'd use modified Sony DTMF equipment that was originally designed to protect massive large libraries of commercial films - digitized to backup for archive storage. These DTM based tapes are huge and the equipment is large and very costly and robot often is used to handle changes and a track system into and out of a safe storage facility where copies are uniquely canned and tagged for off-site vaulted storage (with a min 45 min recovery time). Even with a lower end/affordable solution, (Say Sony AIT 5 based), the above can protect across a network, about 1.7 Gigabytes per minute (not bad and one may protect several Terabytes easily and cheaply). I do recommend multi-hon/homing systems, so all your backup traffic can run over a separate switched network and I/O will not hit the interfaces of protected systems - use one int and switch for Backup and another for production traffic.. I know a great many will say send it all to disc... well that just does not work as well as many assume and it is harder to get it off-site and is restricted by line speeds - even the fastest, say 50 MB/Sec fiber is a lot slower than we can write out to tape or a SAN/NAS while inspecting each and providing secondary encryption at the same time. It is also a lot cheaper than the infrastructure to not only protect, but RESTORE massive amounts of data at the brick level. Finally, for Windows guys, use three solutions: VSS/Volume Snaps, Tape as above and online archives via a service from Iron Mountain. None of it is really cheap to manage, but all of it can and will save your bacon "on the day" and for the love of God, create multiple mail storage groups with each containing three mail stores only and stagger users from any one company across all of them (this last bit is for Exchange operators). This post was edited by lketchum on Monday, October 12, 2009 at 13:26. |
| #8 By 15406 (99.240.77.173) at 10/12/2009 2:52:17 PM |
| #7: Let me get this straight. You're taking an enterprise failure of massive proportions from a Microsoft-owned company and pinning it on UNIX and open source??? And they could have avoided this if only they had used Windows for the heavy lifting??? That's rich, even by your standards. Do you have any actual knowledge to back this claim up, or were you just gassing, like in that web standards thread? |
| #9 By 23275 (68.117.163.128) at 10/12/2009 9:20:23 PM |
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Actual use and experience. I've seen this very episode and have helped some very large companies deal with it. And yes, it was Windows and other commercial software that provided and still does, the solution, which has been tried, tested and proven over and over again.
Hundreds of millions of transactions a day. And yes, it was open sorce that was on its butt. |
| #10 By 28801 (65.90.202.10) at 10/13/2009 6:00:19 AM |
| I'm not sure the article mentioned open sources software being used. Regardless, It was run in a Microsoft datacenter. There should have been adequate safeguards in place to mitigate the risk and ensure the rapid recovery of lost data. |
| #11 By 28801 (65.90.202.10) at 10/13/2009 6:39:22 AM |
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"Microsoft said in an emailed statement that the recovery process has been "incredibly complex" because it suffered a confluence of errors from a server failure that hurt its main and backup databases supporting Sidekick users."
"confluence of errors" I'm gonna remember that excuse. BOSS: "Why didn't we meet our SLA?" ME: "Well, there was a confluence of errors that prevented us from achieving our service levels" Then I'll throw in some corporate speak: ME: "We are currently reassessing our risk management processes and procedures and imposing measures to ensure compliance with stated SLAs and Internal Controls and Standards." This post was edited by rxcall on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 06:58. |
| #12 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 10/13/2009 7:54:45 AM |
| #9: Right, then. You don't have any factual knowledge of this case as your non-answer proves, but still blame it on UNIX and OSS. You were just gassing as I suspected. Maybe it was Apple and Google's fault somehow, too. You're so hilariously partisan. MS generally eats their own dog food and Windows is awesome until a catastrophe happens, and then suddenly it's because MS must have been using UNIX. |
| #13 By 89249 (64.207.240.90) at 10/13/2009 9:07:22 AM |
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Sigh, lets all take a deep breath.
First off, Microsoft just bought Danger last year. I highly doubt you can blame the tech for such a mature project on the same ole Micosoft preceived shortcommings. While I'm sure the persons working on these systems have a Microsoft employee ID number I highly doubt the staff wasn't just pulled in from the original Danger Inc. We can also safely assume that Ketchum's scenario makes more sense than most. I'm pretty sure most of us here are fairly used to Microsoft Windows backup programs and options. I can't imagine ever having such a massive failure in a backup procedure considering the act of backing up and restoring is pretty idiot proof. Regardless, since this is such a new Microsoft asset lets all use our noodle and not forget that this asset was mature, seperate, and produced by another company. I'm sure there is going to be some whistle blower who would have been crowing for a new backend system for this data but I'm also equally as sure the "it's worked this long" "if it ain't broke don't fix it" argument was prevailent. Think Hotmail when MS bought it running full Unix. IMO this sounds like a SAN failure of epic proportions w/o a decent backup strat or a backup strat that is rarely tested. If I were to fault anything with MS with the information I've heard it would be not adequetly auditing the backup and recovery procedures (identifiying and testing). I would call that inexcusable but rarely does one receive such a blackeye from overlooking it. Anything that happens with this service from now on will be 100% Microsoft owned though. Let's let the talking heads and uninformed blame this solely on MS. |
| #14 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 10/13/2009 9:26:05 AM |
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#13: We can also safely assume that Ketchum's scenario makes more sense than most.
Despite his clear lack of facts? He has no idea what he's talking about here, and none of us have any more information than the very little that has been dug up so far. Ketchum's post is a guess out of the many possible scenarios. It doesn't have any more credence than theories of insider sabotage, massive SAN failure, botched platform migration, etc etc. I don't believe that this is solely Microsoft's fault at all, but I do not share Ketchum's "Pin the Tail on UNIX" story. The full story will come out somewhere down the road. The Inquirer has an interesting bit of grist for the mill here: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1558348/some-sidekick-recoverable |
| #15 By 28801 (65.90.202.10) at 10/13/2009 10:16:21 AM |
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Latch, How can you possibly use the inquirer as a source. You diminish yourself and your POV when you do that.
From Wikipedia: Some media reports have suggested that Microsoft hired Hitachi to perform an upgrade to its "storage area network (SAN), when something went wrong, resulting in data destruction." |
| #16 By 23275 (68.117.163.128) at 10/13/2009 11:14:30 AM |
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Latch, more than speculating about exactly what may have happened, I am trying to offer some relevance for people who come to this site - where they may manage heterogeneous environments and offer what does work across a scale of scenarios that are most relevant to visitors here. Drawing on our own experiences where we do all work for small companies and small parts of important work for really big companies and governmental departments, the idea is to share what we have done that does work opposite what we have seen that does not work.
As this unfolds we're likely going to see that the group involved did not has as much experience with the installed back end and that the work was contracted to the manufacturer that did. Most probably, there was a migration from the old Danger infrastructure to Microsoft's and in that move many things went wrong. This would be separate from the work done on "Pink" as part of the platform upon which SideKick devices and others will likely end up running on. While the scale may be different, it is highly probable that data integrity and recovery exercises were incomplete and assumptions were made about the old infrastructure. I have seen it happen before and had to recover and write back up to two years worth of transaction data for customers that has assumed that their systems had it covered. They didn't and yes, they were Unices, now protected by Windows systems and other commercial software that run parallel to them to provide backup, recovery and archiving. As a matter of routine, we have written back months and years' worth of data so it may be re-processed and it does so very quickly. That is not necessarily heavy lifting, but rather than just backup, the customer is confident enough in a proven ability that re-processing and analyzing older data is now considered a feature and while the same methods are used to support disaster recovery, they are also now used to support new types of analysis - say for testing fraud detection, or loyalty and rewards software. The corporation’s CITO does not really care that I used Windows - he does care that it now works and that in addition to protected data, he can use archived data in new ways. The revenue is good and the work is relatively easy - though our checks and balances are instense and include the ability to put back a year's data for an entire nameplate in under 20 minutes. Not bad. |
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