Ok folks, get your popcorn and herbal calming tea if you don't like emotional rollercoasters.
Today I start my "Tales from the Architect Crypt Short Story Series"
I must stress that these stories are fiction possibly inspired ever so slightly by real events. All characters in these stories have no relation to real ones, especially management and sales folks. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Out of Mind, Out of site, Out of reach, OFFSITE
Burke's Best Backups is a Canadian company offering Backup Consulting. Ben Burke is Burke's CEO,CTO,CIO,CFO.. basically every title that starts with a C, except for Criminal.
Ben does not actually do anything other than listening to customers problems with a quiet and simple serene smile. He then responds calmly while emphasizing the word "we" in the sentence "we should be able to help you" before handing all of the work over to his main Backup Administrator, Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) Jolly Jeff.
Jolly Jeff got that nickname because he is always in a bad mood. This is primarily due to overwork and challenges with emotional intelligence which he is attempting to correct with a multitude of unfinished "improve yourself" Udemy courses.
However, I digress. The nature of their work is to consult customers on how to design solid data protection setups. Very often potential customers contact Burke's Backups only after they have been hit by a disaster.
One such client was "Dean's Dangerous Deliveries" Dean specializes in stealth incognito deliveries of time wasting hobby equipment like fishing gear. Dean's customers don't want people to know that they are spending hours during the working day out on fishing sorties.
So in a nutshell Dean's Data is very confidential!
Dean thought he had a great backup setup. He leveraged Titanium Backup Software that performed crash consistent backups of the hypervisors and then offloaded these backups containing potentially corrupted and unencrypted vms to tape secondary copies.
In case you missed it, those were the first two "ah the horror" moments in our story.
What do you think the design flaws are considering the nature of the data?
Dean's datacenter "Dollar A DAY DATA CENTER" was located in a particularly unstable seismic zone with frequent minor earthquakes and Dean was worried that the water pipes that ran under the ceiling over his servers might at some point burst. As insurance and in order to comply with the "the 1 + 1 lets be dumb" rule of data protection, Dean had instructed his main System Administrator "Wild Willy" to take the tapes home every Friday night and store them in his basement, which by the way also had water pipes running along the ceiling.
One fateful Friday evening Wild Willy decided it was time to relax and on the way home stopped by a bar for one beer!
However, life and disasters are always full of surprises and just like your yearly tax deductions, increases can occur unexpectedly. That was the case for Wild Willy and his beer consumption that evening. Now don't worry Willy took a taxi home.
The problem was when he forgot to take the tapes with him and left them in the trunk of his car. The next morning Willy rushed back to the bar only to find his car was gone. The backup tapes had been converted in to true air gap, in fact one could even term this a new type of data protection "expanding air gap" as the distance of the stolen car to its origin incrementally increased while on its way to the next big city for sale.
Luckily the Toronto Police were able to catch the criminals and the car and tapes were returned but Dean realized he had a problem with his Data Protection and decided to go to the professionals for help.
Stay tuned next week when Big Bad Ben gets Jolly Jeff to setup an affordable data protection solution with Veeam and offsite copies for Dangerous Dean's Deliveries!
