Nibble:- No silver bullets for slaying storage demons

Whenever I used to watch the first series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was impressed and intrigued by the impressive array of weapons which the Scoobies used to take out of Giles' armory. Not just sharpened stakes, but axes, knives, crossbows, swords and crucifixes too - an impressive range of symbolic medieval ironmongery. Not so often silver bullets because silver bullets kill werewolves, and these were rarely a problem in Sunnydale.

Yet despite being well stocked with slayer cutlery, and extensive training, sometimes our heroes had to use tactics other than heart staking or decapitation to save the world once more from the armageddon.

I imagine that Giles, who had an extensive library on demons, could be a difficult customer when approached by a wannabe demon weapons sales person. The conversation might go something like this...

"The Demon Slayer 4 is the latest and greatest weapon made by Demon Death Corp. Incorporating the latest technology and feedback from out focus groups it kills all demons and other nasty things at close and medium range. It's clockwork powered, requires no batteries, is portable and can be operated by someone no stronger than a teenage girl. The product is kept continuously up to date by downloading the latest adjustment settings from our web site."

"Give me a demonstration" says Giles. The salesperson from Demon Death Corp complies by dialing up a holographic demon which is quickly despatched into electron dust.

"Tell you what" says Giles, not very convinced. "If you can survive one night on patrol in Sunnydale, armed with nothing more than the Demon Slayer 4, I'll buy three of them."

The salesperson is no fool. The Demon Slayer 4 is much improved compared to the Mark 3 model, but given a choice between losing your commission or losing your soul, it's better to find more gullible customers elsewhere.

And this is where I get back to the storage market...

Nobody is going to offer your organization a cast iron guarantee that they can keep your data available no matter what. And I mean a guarantee which includes reimbursing you for loss of profits and other consequential losses which occur when their product fails to work, even when the storage demon is one which was not specified in the contract. Fire flood, and having a haunted server are not valid getout clauses.

Here are just a few examples of what can go wrong.

Your disk to disk backup system replicates your data in real-time across all your sites... What could go wrong? - Due to a programming error by your storage administrator who was testing a new hardware upgrade the live data and backed up data got deleted by accident. (We're going to run an article soon about what happened to one company when this happened to their Sun server in real life. None of their software or hardware suppliers were able to help them.)

Your web based backup system has been so reliable and convenient in recent years that you decided not to upgrade your tape libraries. Instead the web backup has become your primary form of data protection. What could go wrong? - On Monday morning you need to recover data on a server in one of your factories which was stolen at the weekend. But you keep getting error messages. Eventually you ring the online backup company. Or try too. Later that day after a lot of phone calls and web research you learn that they went bust last week. The press was warning about it, but you never saw those headlines. Their equipment has already been boxed up and bought by a reputable broker who diligently wiped the disks and tapes clean.

Your accounting records are archived according to the latest standards on optical media which is guaranteed to last 30 years and could even last longer. The network attached jukebox is so convenient that you decided to stop paying for the storage and testing of the reel to reel tape backups which the new system replaced... What could go wrong? - A fire in the nearby stationery cupboard spread to your computer room. The servers are being replaced tomorrow, and you've got an offsite daily tape backup for your live data, but your archived optical data is black sticky globules.

Your tape backup, set up by your predecessor works like a dream. Because your company has downsized to less than half the size it used to be, the original system still has plenty of capacity. Every day for the last few years you've been getting reassuring reports which confirm that the backups, have been going OK. Every day you do an incremental backup (which take 45 minutes) which you take home for safe keeping, and every Friday you do a full backup and rotate the tapes to make sure that you always have at least two sets of workable backups. What could go wrong? - The marketing director calls. Your new company catalog got trashed by a virus. Not to worry you've got the backup tape from yesterday. That's when you discover that the backup software parameters were set up long before your company bought the tools and workstations it uses to compile the catalog, and the data has never actually been backed up at all. The only reason you didn't discover this before was because the users were making unofficial backups of their individual work and they didn't bother you if minor things went wrong. Now something major has gone wrong they've contacted you. But you don't have a solution.

The lesson from this story is the following...

Like the Demon Slayer 4, all backup technologies are merely simple tools designed to solve one problem well. Sometimes they can be adapted to solve more than one problem. But when you meet the backup storage demon one dark night on patrol be sure you've got more than just a pointy stick and a clove of garlic in your pocket because you can't be sure that the demon's going to be a vampire.