Unbelievable

I can't wait to hear the real story behind this:

The Sidekick was one of the first phones to keep all your e-mail, contacts, events, and photos in an online "cloud"; cool, right? But in the wake of a critical server outage more than a week ago, frustrated Sidekick users are learning the hard way that when things go wrong, cloud computing isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

In what's shaping up to be one of the worst tech train wrecks of 2009, T-Mobile and Microsoft (owner of Sidekick developer Danger) admitted Saturday that any contact, events, or to-do lists that haven't already been restored following a massive server meltdown earlier this month are probably gone forever.

Data backup and recovery at the enterprise level is one of the more interesting, challenging, and expensive aspects to managing a data center. It gets even more fun when integrated as part of an overall disaster recovery plan.

Just before the last company I worked for so horribly imploded, I had built a 2-year plan for moving the company away from the mess of small servers that had been foisted on me to a "scale up" system based around a SAN(eventually two SANs) and a server(s) more along the lines of an ES7000. I won't bore you with further details, but one of the beautiful things about a SAN is its ability to easily create snapshots in the 24/7 environment that we had evolved to, as opposed to the tape backups we were still using by the time I quit. Eventually, the plan was to have a mirror site that could be used as a failover in the event of a disaster at the primary site and essentially get us to both real time data backup and assured application availability.

All cool stuff and pretty expensive too. The point I was trying to get through to management at the time was so is losing data, maybe as much as a days worth. It's not really that expensive if your company is moving thousands of shipments a day and has $450 million a year in sales.

Which gets us back to Microsoft and T-Mobile. How can companies that big not have a foolproof data backup and recovery plan? I'm trying to imagine a scenario where this is possible in this day and age that doesn't involve gross incompetence or actual malfeasance on the part of those two behemoths. I can't. It's really quite amazing. Eventually the story will come out I think. I bet it will be a doozy.