Showing posts with label carbonite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carbonite. Show all posts

Friday, April 03, 2009

Promise Tech Sued By Carbonite : A Lesson In Data and Responsibility

Three days ago I decided to write a blog post that focused on an issue which at first glance would seem to have all the stuff of sleep-producing content.  It's a tech matter involving a company known as Carbonite , who's corporate mission is to provide "Unlimited online backup for one flat fee" according to its website, versus another firm Promise Technology.  The same website reads "How will you survive a computer disaster" and with a photo of a man that could very well be me, head bowed in his hand. 

Video version:




YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Crackle and Sclipo

In fact, a couple of months ago that was me.  My MacBook's hard drive crashed big time, and while I was away from my home and office.  Even though I was visiting my mother in suburban Atlanta, I was still without my second computer and even worse, I had to catch a flight in just five hours.  So, I found a place nearby that works with Apple products and the tech warned me to have my "stuff" backed up.   All of the "stuff" I needed was online in various places, so I was ok.  

But it never entered my mind to me to sue Apple Computer.   

Thus my interest in this lawsuit over a matter that happened over a year ago but with a lawsuit filed almost two weeks ago.  Here's what happened:  

According to The Boston Globe , Carbonite is suing Promise Technology and another company Interactive Digital Systems for allegedly faulty equipment and breach of warranty, respectively.  Carbonite was responsible for over 7,500 backups which it lost in 2007.   Promise Technology hardware was supposed to monitor customer data and preserve the information  Carbonite claims the products by Promise were "defective".

Promise stands by its hardware devices and says they're reliable.  

This story has hit the tech blogsphere like wildfire.  It was picked up by TechCrunch first, and that story became linkbait for a number of blog posts rendering fact and opinion, including mine, because I was interested in what the comment writers had to say, most of which was critical against Carbonite.  

See, what's hard for many to wrap their mind around is why Carbonite itself lacked a backup system, especially considering the number of customers they had?  Every time I've had a hard drive problem over the years, people have asked, "Did you backup your data?"  That's asked all the time; I can hear someone asking it now.  So, the story spread and so did the comments.  Eventually, even our San Francisco Focus Blog entry on this had comments.  But one of them really caught my attention.  

This one:


Hi Zennie, 
I would like to make sure that your readers understand two points with regard to Carbonite’s lawsuit against Promise Technologies as your headline is misleading to the facts of the case:
1) This event happened over a year ago. We do not say this to minimize the matter. But we do want to point out that this has not happened in a long time and is not an ongoing problem. 
2) The total number of Carbonite customers who were unable to retrieve their data was 54, not 7,500. We did take responsibility for the loss of data, which impacted the 54 customers. 
Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 2006 and 2007 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don't lose any data. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as "firmware" in the storage servers. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were completely restored without incident. Statistically, about 2 out of every 1,000 consumer hard drives will crash every week, so 54 of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. Since they weren’t completely backed up when their PCs crashed, these customers were unable to restore all of their files from Carbonite. Most of the 54 got some or most of their data back. We took full responsibility for what happened and I did my best to call each of these customers personally to apologize. 
As a result of our problems with the Promise servers, we switched to a popular Dell server that uses RAID6 – an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. This configuration is in theory 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive — the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil. 
So far, Promise has refused to accept responsibility for their equipment’s failures, so now we are suing them to get our money back. The Dell RAID servers have been flawless and we're extremely happy with them. 
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.

Dave's friendly comment certainly gave this blog entry new weight, but something Mr. Friend wrote concerned me:

 The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as "firmware" in the storage servers. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were completely restored without incident. 

"We believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs" is another way of claiming there's no real evidence to back that claim.  That's a real problem and I'm surprised Dave Friend just hauled off and wrote that.  In other words, there's no way Carbonite can actually prove Promise Technology's hardware was at fault.  They have their belief, but that's it.  That means there could have been a lot of actions that led to the loss of customer data, and even Carbonite's Friend admits that only 54 of 7,500 customers were adversely impacted by this data loss.

Let's go back to my Apple example.  If my Apple MacBook crashes, techs ask me if I use disk utility tools to properly maintain the hard drive.  They instruct me to use those tools both in the care and recovery of data and the hard drive. Thus the care of the hard drive is ultimately my responsibility.




This is also at SFGate.com

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Promise Technology Inc Announces New ServicePlus On-Site Parts Replacement Program for US and Canada

First I take a stance on how backing up data is a personal responsibility and how Carbonite - a data protection company -- should take the rap for losing its customer's data, then I get comments on the San Francisco Blog about it, and from some high level folks, and now a press release?  Interesting.  It means our blogs matter in the tech world after all.  Here's the release I got on Promise Technology's news about an onsight parts replacement program:


Promise Announces New ServicePlus On-Site Parts Replacement Program for US and Canada
Industry leading support program expands to include on-site component swap offering

MILPITAS, Calif., April 1, 2009 – Promise Technology Inc., a leading supplier of sophisticated RAID storage solutions for enterprise and SMB customers, today announced general availability of the Promise ServicePlus parts replacement plan for their VTrak enterprise class RAID storage subsystems. The ServicePlus program is an available upgrade to Promise’s leading 3-Year limited advanced parts replacement warranty. The ServicePlus plan offers onsite parts replacement 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the existing VTrak warranty period.

The Promise ServicePlus Plan provides for the rapid response and installation of components that have been identified as being in a fault state. This program provides storage administrators with the peace of mind that their storage is protected 24x7 against component failure. Combined with Promise’s existing 24x7 technical phone support this program is able to significantly minimize downtime. Average response time for component replacement can be as little as four hours in most major metropolitan areas.

“The ServicePlus program builds upon our already best in class support program”, said Vijay Char, Vice President of QA and Support, Promise Technology.  “Continuing to add to our support offering is part of our commitment to providing our customers with the best available uptime and service.”

The Promise ServicePlus plan is available for VTrak E-Class RAID, J-Class expansion chassis and M-Class iSCSI models in the 3U/16-bay form factor. The program is valid for the entire 3 year VTrak standard warranty period.

Pricing and Availability
The Promise ServicePlus plan is immediately available in the U.S. and Canada. Please contact the Promise sales department for further information.


About Promise Technology, Inc.
With a long history of innovation, Promise Technology develops and manufactures sophisticated RAID solutions – offering a complete line of RAID controller cards and SAS/SATA RAID subsystems catering to enterprise, mid-range and entry-level data protection needs worldwide. Known as the originator of SATA/ATA RAID products, Promise’s comprehensive product base includes high available (HA) standalone RAID subsystems with standards-based management interfaces, SAS host-based (internal) RAID controllers for servers and NAS appliances for SOHO. Headquartered in Milpitas, Calif., Promise is ISO-9001:2000 and ISO-14001:2004 certified, and has offices and operations throughout Asia and Europe to support local business partners and customers. For more information, visit Promise Technology's website at http://www.promise.com/serviceplu

Monday, March 30, 2009

Carbonite Online Backup Company Loses Data; Carbonite Is At Fault

I had to post this because it's a classic example of not taking responsibility for something you did wrong.  The online backup company Carbonite reportedly lost a lot of client information : the data of over 7,500 of its customers who trusted it (past tense now) to keep their information in a protected area of cyberspace: a cloud they developed and around which their company is built.

Now as long as I've been at this I've always got an earful about "backing up your data" so I would think a company like Carbonite, which is entrusted with protecting data, would be backing up the data they're charged with protecting.  Right?

Right?

No.  They lost the only data copies they had online, and so now are -- get this -- suing the hardware makers!  If you think that's funny (strange), so do many in the blogsphere, who think as I do.  Take a look at these comments over at TechCrunch :

1) What happens when you get burgled?
We got burgled last week and they took all my local backups. Fortunately I had it all backed up on S3 (and elsewhere too) which saved the day. Not having an offsite backup is a recipe for disaster.
2) They didn’t even have a proper backup? Feels sorry for those who have lost valuable data…
3) “The danger of storing your data in the cloud”
What you should have wrote was:
“The danger of storing your data in the cloud that’s not Amazon.”
Why pigeonhole the real company thats does cloud right for a company that tried to compete against them and failed?
4) No excuse. Carbonite need to accept the blame regardless of who actually caused the problem. It was their decision to use whatever suppliers they chose. I fail to see how they can recover customer confidence after a fiasco such as this.
5) This is the scary thing with putting your data with a company you’ve never heard of. I guess for that matter, putting your data with anyone is a scary thing. Has anyone used amazon s3 with success? I still feel like a drobo or hp media start server is the way to go. Backup is a tough thing.
6) The issue isn’t who the company is but how it does business. I work with a local IT company and we offer various kinds and flavors of backup, typically 3X redundant (live volume, local sync volume, local removable backup volume, offsite RAID). We do this all ourselves with system(s) we built. We started offering backup/recovery because of things like this. I recently moved a customer from a Big Brand Name Backup vendor. Said vendor had not run numerous backups. Said vendor charged ransom to provide the data when the customer quit. Said vendor basically refused to play nice with anyone, even when paid. Carbonite is not expensive but is obviously better at marketing than they they are at solution design (or accepting responsibility for their own mistakes).