[Gllug] MS & LSE ROFL!

[Nix]

On 21 Nov 2009, general told this:

> Nix wrote:
>> Work is an "MS Partner" and all the sysadmins (so-called) are MS people,
>> so they run VMs under VMWare on Windows 2008 Server. Even the SAN is
>> running Windows (which I didn't know was possible until I heard that).
>>
>> Last week they had some horrendous Windows bluescreen clusterfsck and
>> all the data on the *entire SAN* was lost. *All* of it.
>>
>> They are 'trying' to recover from backups now, but it is 'touch-and-go'.
>> WTF? Can't Windows even do a *backup* properly? How hard can copying a
>> file over and over again be?
>
> The T-mobile sidekick fiasco was due to an MS powered SAN upgrade
> failure. It seems like it's not uncommon for large SANs not to be backed
> up these days!

I suppose there is the problem that the only thing big enough to back it
up onto is another SAN... but still, if you don't back it up, you have
to make damn sure that the SAN's controlling software would never ever
lose its contents. I'm not sure mathematical proof would be strong
enough for me: I'd also want a proof that no single/double-bit errors,
disk losses, overshoots, missed seeks, or uncommanded writes anywhere in
the SAN could lead to massive data loss.

I doubt I can get a SAN that satisfies those requirements, so for me I'm
going to stick with backups.
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