This one hits it out of the park ...

On James' blog Heh. I think we’ve had and seen others have this conversation before. RAID is not a backup. Backup is very important. Ok, I did burst out laughing. The low level scan of 1PB of data to find data on the “no_backup” folder … Yeah. Customer has a file system. We’ve asked them “is your data important” and they’ve answered “no”. And we try to really get whether or not its important out of them, as they didn’t spend money on a backup, and there is the potential for a single failure to take down their data. Increase entropy in the universe and all that. Sure enough, the not so important data becomes absolutely precious and must-recover-at-all-costs once there is an issue on this scratch file system. I especially liked the Newegg parts. The “we can build it ourself” parts, and the wanting 10PB for $5k USD on a $50M USD grant. Yeah, I hate to say, we’ve seen, and heard similar requests. But any relation to faculty members of a prestigious east coast university? Nah… Not likely. I lost it at “I’m kind of a big deal.” Got a good chuckle out of that.