Comments on: More Details On What Caused the Sidekick Disaster

By: shannon

shannon — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:07:15 +0000

CDMA is essentially sunset technology now anyway, with carriers either building LTE (preferred) networks or wimax, so itd be pointless having a cdma sidekick (there were plans back in the sk color days)

But like I said, thered be nothing to worry about. Still find it strange only tmo usa was signiicantly affected in this outage: tmo uk and telstra au generally had no problems

By: Lina Inverse

Lina Inverse — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:15:17 +0000

shannon: Yes, Verizon and Cellco Partnership doing business as Verizon Wireless are two separate companies, the latter is a a 55-45% joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone Group.

I wouldn’t day CDMA is useless (in fact it’s very clever superior technology and it’s no accident that Verizon Wireless with it’s emphasis on quality of service chose it) but for a variety of reasons it has a small share of the world’s networks and with Qualcomm being such a junkyard dog it’s going to stay that way.

By: shannon

shannon — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:12:29 +0000

just an fyi to the first comment, just becuase the server/s are located in a verizon data centre does not necessarily mean verizon is taking over; I’m pretty sure the phone and data companies are seperate.

Plus Verizon uses CDMA which is useless

By: Lina Inverse

Lina Inverse — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:34:50 +0000

With Microsoft/Danger now saying “Never mind, we’re restoring most if not all of your data”, this rumor is now the best one out there (assuming Microsoft is not lying now, at least at some level).

Only question remains is the Sunday? “Repent, Sinners, for your data is lost forever!” communication … from T-Mobile.

Did they get wrong info from Microsoft/Danger? I doubt they wanted to gratuitous stick it to Microsoft since the fall out to T-Mobile is so bad.

One possibility is that Microsoft decided it would cost too much to do a full restore (I suspect problems with their backups) or the people Roz Ho had access to didn’t have what it took, so T-Mobile sent out that message to light a fire under them (with Azure’s release only months away). T-Mobile has 100 million reasons ($100 times a million Sidekick users) to do anything they can to get a good outcome, so maybe they got desperate and threw down the gauntlet and then Microsoft decided to bite the bullet and do the hard work.

By: Alessandra

Alessandra — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:51:58 +0000

800TB of data?! WOW! That will take awhile to restore, and from just reading that I don’t think we’ll be seeing the DI anytime soon, but damn…but if they can restore every one of our data then I’m happy but let’s not get our hopes high. That’s ALOT of work to do, and then after that they’ll probably work on an OTA for the SidekickLX’09.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:23:48 +0000

There setup may sound like a micky mouse ‘all the eggs in one basket’ setup, but there are MANY companies doing exactly the same thing!! Big names too, very big names. People you use everyday in fact. The phone company, the power company, some banks, just to name a few. I bet the secert squirrel does it. They put all their data in one big SAN (an EMC Symmetrix DMX) and they think that by backing up off site they are cover. Surprise! They’re not! Sure you have a backup, but it will take a week to recover!

Now, Google on the other hand, uses cheap desktop drive in millions of servers. The email you mistakenly sent to the boss about how much of an idiot he is was copied 100’s of times across the globe. Sorry, that email isn’t going to be lost due to a crappy EMC back plane crash taking out the parity drive that makes a RAID into a JBOD!!

By: Secret Squirrel

Secret Squirrel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:36:56 +0000

I’m a storage admin and this explanation gets to the bottom of A LOT of the situation. I’ve not found any storage vendor is “BAD” just incompetent techs + bad communication from management! And this situation was FULL of that. I understand you don’t want to set expectations high, but the “you lost your data” would NOT have been my first communication to anyone up the chain. I think someone somewhere gave up too fast. Regardless, with some rough calculations it would take 5 days minimum to recover from more than 100 backup tapes! Makes sense for the recommendation of warm (NON battery removed) reboots/power cycles to begin re-synching! =)

By: someone on the inside

someone on the inside — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:42:42 +0000

No EMC gear at a Verizon site in Kent, WA. One of those three things (vendor, site owner, or location) is wrong.

By: TMOBILEISRETARTED

TMOBILEISRETARTED — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:59:01 +0000

microsoft destroys another thing, not suprised

By: AG

AG — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:26:02 +0000

Kent? Freaking KENT?! As in “Kent, currently planning for a flood-plain event engineers say is pretty much a lock for this winter?” Kent as in “we’re not actually worried about the overbuilt berm we call a dam bursting ’cause we’ll release water into the flood plain long before that happens?”

( http://www.seattlepi.com/local/411029_flood13.html , if you’re not from around here; plenty more where that came from if you run a search on either the P-I or the Times)

Brilliant. As if EMC’s behavior doesn’t add enough poo to the pasta, now Sidekick users get to watch the weather south of Seattle and wonder if their server has water wings. People are scrambling to move their data OUT of south King County right now, not to it. Sheesh.