By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Lyle Lovett’s Pontiac:
Brian Scott,
president of Landmark Commercial, a commercial real estate firm based in Arlington,
Texas had a problem. His server at work melted down, so he went back to his
apartment to retrieve a backup copy of critical business data he had stored on
a portable hard drive.
“As I was leaving my apartment, the hard drive slipped out of my hand and tumbled down a flight of
concrete stairs. I ran down the stairs, but after one look at the case, I
knew that years of data and lots of valuable work were lost,” said Scott. “From
that point on, every day I worry about backing up business data.”
Scott’s travails earned him the dubious distinction of Most
Disastrous Data Loss, an “award” handed out by EVault, Inc., an online
backup and recovery firm.
EVault today announced winners of its first annual Data Turkey Awards to “honor” business professionals
who “have lived through a data loss, or whose actions and quick thinking have helped
to avert a data disaster,” according to company officials.
EVault solicited award submissions in two categories – Most
Disastrous Data Loss and Most Spectacular Data Recovery. Award applicants were
asked to share lowlights and highlights regarding their data recovery and data
loss situations. The awards were open to any small business owner, IT or
business professional.
Assuaging the sting somewhat is the prize of a $500 American
Express gift check, a $500 contribution on behalf of each winner to a local
charity or food bank of their choice and a free one-year subscription to EVault’s
Protect online data protection for up to 10 gigabytes of data.
“EVault received an abundance of entries – some tragic, some
funny and some just arcane – but all demonstrating the myriad of ways data can
disappear forever and in the blink of an eye,” said Phil Gilmour, president and
CEO of EVault, Inc. The company claims “tens of thousands of successful data
restorations since 1997.”
The winner in the Most
Spectacular Data Recovery category was Dunbar St. Paul, a 20-year veteran
computer consultant and president of New Orleans-based Computer Solutions. As
you’d expect, Hurricane Katrina figures in the story:
St. Paul’s entry detailed his travails during Hurricane
Katrina, when his entire client base of 30 companies temporarily lost access to
their data. St. Paul says recovery efforts for one client consisted of driving
across the shoulder of the road, jumping over a fence and trudging through mud
to reach the building – and then donning boots to wade through 18 inches of
muddy, toxic water to retrieve his client’s servers.
He worked to get businesses back up and running in hot sites
from Memphis to Houston.
“All-in-all it has made everyone here aware of the need for
secure, off-site, reliable and efficient data backup and storage,” said St.
Paul. “We had a backup to tape, but here’s the kicker -- the tapes were
inaccessible. Nobody expects there to be a disaster, but the threat is fairly
real, even though we hadn’t had a hurricane in 40 years.”
…
Happy birthday Jane Austen, born in 1775. As The Writer’s Almanac says,
she’s “the only novelist who published before Charles Dickens whose books still
sell thousands of copies every year.”
After the First
World War, “Jane Austin novels were prescribed to shell-shocked English
soldiers for therapy, because the psychologists found that Austen helped them
recover their sense of the world they’d known before the war.”
The writer who
wrote so incisively and popularly about getting married never married herself.
…
IntelliCorp, a
system support of SAP vendor, today announced that NetProcess has been validated for integration with Mercury Quality Center. IntelliCorp has
also joined the Mercury Elite Technology Alliance Program.
…
NeuStar, a communications clearinghouse
services vendor, has announced the
acquisition of Foretec Seminars Inc., a provider of secretariat services to
the Internet Engineering Task Force, from the Corporation for National Research
Initiatives.
In connection with the acquisition, NeuStar Secretariat
Services, LLC, a subsidiary of NeuStar, has signed a service agreement with the
Internet Society on behalf of the IETF Administrative Support Activity to
provide secretariat functions in support of the IETF.
…
Anadigics, Inc., a vendor of wireless and
broadband, has unveiled two new
front-end products for wireless LAN mobile and multiple input multiple
output applications.
Anadigics’ front-end integrated circuits use the company’s patent pending
InGaP-Plus technology to offer integration and performance. The low-profile
FEICs combine the power amplifier, low-noise amplifier, and RF antenna switch
on a single die to minimize three dimensional space requirements.
The new products, according to company officials, exhibit “exceptionally
low current consumption to reduce battery drain in mobile and MIMO
applications.”
…
The Economist
Intelligence Unit does quite good national risk assessment
reports, their one on Hungary is
typically good. Highlights:
“Nearly $6 billion in telecommunications investment, $3 billion
of this from foreign investors, has transformed the moribund telecoms system
inherited from the communist era into one
of the best in the region…
“Hungary is still far
behind basic EU levels for infrastructure provision…
“Integrated Services
Digital Network penetration is on the rise, and cable operators like UPC offer full-scale Internet access in
several regions. Within fixed lines, the share of ISDN lines was 16.2% at the
end of April 2003, compared with 14.1% a year earlier. Global Telesystems announced
in May 2000 that it had built the first fiber-optic connection to Budapest from
the company’s EU-wide fiber network. Other fiber connections from Budapest to
hubs in Vienna are being developed…
“Broadband communications are spreading
rapidly, and most modern services are available or will soon be. Asymmetric
Digital Subscriber Line services were launched in late 2000, by Matav, the dominant telecoms company,
and by Vivendi, the second-largest
fixed-line provider. Since then, ADSL penetration has been increasing rapidly
and had reached 2% by the end of 2002…
“With the liberalization
of the telecoms market, UPC (Hungary’s leading cable provider) and other
players are introducing voice and data transmission over television cables. It
is estimated that about 45% of Hungary’s 3.8 million households subscribe to
cable television…
“Mobile-phone
penetration is growing rapidly: it was at 71.2% in May 2003, up from 56% in
May 2002, according to the Communication Authority. There are three GSM 900
providers, which also provide DCS 1800 services. An auction for Universal
Mobile Telecoms Services frequency concessions was scheduled for late 2003…
“The dominant mobile provider, Westel, launched General
Packet Radio Services in 2000 and offered full coverage of the country in
August 2001; rival Pannon launched
its own service in July 2001. This will eventually increase the speed of mobile
data transmission from the present fastest speed of 20 kb/s to 100 kb/s with
the use of a GPRS handset…
“Westel launched Wireless
Local Area Network service in November 2002 at Budapest’s Ferihegy Airport.
The service is available at 28 points throughout Hungary, with additional
points to be added soon.”
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