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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Uh,

Sorry but "cloud" or not, SAN or not, the MS/Danger fail was a stunning failure of process. Who cares what the underlying technology was or how it failed? What matters is that a multi-billion dollar software company actually managed to loose, permanently, their customers' data through obvious carelessness, through either lack of a backup in some fashion or other (and don't even try to argue they could have had an excuse - "multi-billion dollar company" "reputation" backups might be sort-of hard maybe - perhaps - but MS is supposed know what it's doing). Lightning and Asteroids wouldn't strike five different carefully chosen locations...

My guess is that this will hit MS really hard over time. Even if they actually were hoping Danger would dry-up and blow away, they've now done the worst case scenario to customers. Repeat after me "never let MS near your data...".

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"MS is supposed know what it's doing"

I was in complete agreement with you up to this point. Microsoft's strengths have long ago shifted towards marketing. They once had a edge in technology - over Lotus, over Borland, over Novell, over IBM and even over Apple (in the OS7~9 days).

Sadly, after their market share - and dominance of the OEM channels - exceeded a certain tipping point, they had really no need to excel in technology. From that point on, what differentiated Microsoft was a careful management of the expectations of their core market (VARs, OEMs and CTOs).

At Microsoft, technical competency has taken a back-seat since the early 90s.

This entire mess up smells like "Management by numbers". When a manager cuts costs without considering the implications to data-safety, this is what we get in the end.

Seriously: how much data needed to be backed up? 50 terabytes? 500 terabytes? And why the hell the data resides in a SAN and not distributed and replicated in a bunch of front-end servers? The SAN should be the back-up.

I love the idea of having all my data on the cloud - It's a major nuisance to switch cellphones and port data from one to the next - and having the data on the cloud could make it easy to access it through a nice web interface not unlike Google's GMail, Calendar, Picasa or Documents. Implementing "back-up your data" and "restore your data" links somewhere would also be quite easy.

And yes. Never let MS near your data.

But that is a failure with the Cloud storage/computing pitch, no?

All along critics have been saying that you'd be nuts to trust someone else to back up and secure your important data.

Its easier to trust someone with your data, if they have triple redundancy built into their architecture. S3 has that built in; a single MS SAN box does not. That's why its an important distinction.

You trust people with the right, next generation trust worthy architecture.

If the architecture is trustworthy, I am fine with it being a couple generations past the leading edge.

When you go for leading edge you often end up with a mix of unproven stuff, assorted approaches, uneven performance and problems nobody ever had. It's fine to experiment, but you should only trust your customers' data to new technology when you find a combination that works well all the time (or, at the very least, when you have mapped all the circumstances it doesn't).

This whole disaster could have been avoided if there were no single point of failure - at the very least, three identical clusters being brought off-line and rebuilt from mirrored data for the upgrade one at a time in order not to disrupt service to users. I am astonished a telco did not know this.

This is correct. It's a people problem, not a technology problem.

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