BITUG will be holding The “BIG SIG” on Wednesday, May 9th, 2018, in London and would like to welcome all NonStop (tm) users to come along to this event.

The event is being held at  the prestigious Trinity House – Tower Hill, London, EC3N 4DH (http://www.trinityhouse.co.uk/th/about/index.html).

For further information please Contact BITUG

Availability Digest Says California Fires Destroy HP Archives

 

An archive of historical documents created by Hewlett-Packard founders William Hewlett and David Packard has been destroyed by a devastating wildfire in Sonoma County, California. Unfortunately, none of the documents had been backed up. No paper backup, no photographic images, nothing digitized. Included in the loss were over 100 boxes of correspondence, speeches, and other material. Valued at USD $2 million, they represented the heart of HP historic activities.

The Sonoma Valley fires were among a series of 250 Northern California blazes in early October 2017. Twenty-one of the fires became major blazes, among them the Tubbs Fire, which grew to become the most destructive wildfire in California history. It was the Tubbs Fire that destroyed the archives. The content dated from 1937 to 1995. They revealed HP’s strategy and its evolution from the beginning of the electronics industry. HP had not made the existence of this cache of documents widely known, and it restricted access. As such, many of the documents lost in the fire had never been made available to researchers. Consequently, the fire consumed a significant piece of the test industry in which HP made its start along with a bit of American history.

In addition to “California Fires Destroy HP Archives,” read the following recent articles in the Availability Digest.

Fire Extinguishers Can Cause Data Center Outages – Numerous cases of data-center outages due to fire-suppression systems have taken place over the years. WestHost, for instance. ING Bank is another. Typically, it’s the noise of the suppression system that takes down servers; and the incidents take place during normal testing of the systems. This article provides examples of companies impacted by such unexpected downtime. It also suggests preventive measures to mitigate fire-suppression issues. The recommendations include: • Select less sensitive hard disk drives or new technologies such as solid-state drives. • Point the sirens and the gas discharge nozzles away from disk enclosures. • Muzzle the sirens during fire-extinguisher tests.

The End of Custom Software – In the 1970s and 1980s, the Digest’s Managing Editor Dr. Bill Highleyman was chairman of The Sombers Group, which specialized in writing custom software for customers. Back then, pre-packaged software solutions were rare. Everything had to be custom-built, aka made-to-order, bespoke. Today, packaged software dominates the market. In “The End of Custom Software,” Bill discusses several of his company’s custom projects and questions whether the interest in building software from scratch exists today only as a historical footnote.

$280 Million in Cryptocurrency Lost Due to Bug – Almost USD $300 million in Ether tokens recently was destroyed by accident. A series of bugs in a popular digital wallet service led one developer to take control of the funds accidentally and then lock them up. Ethereum, using the Ether token, is now the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. The lost Ether tokens were kept in digital wallets created by a developer calling himself ‘Parity.’ As Parity was fixing a bug in his wallet, the modification inadvertently left a second flaw that allowed one user, ‘devops199’, to become the sole owner of every single wallet created by Parity. When he realized what he had done, devops199 attempted to undo the damage by deleting the code that had transferred the funds. His action permanently locked all the funds in the wallets. $280 million were now frozen, unable to be moved. Experts predicted that this loss was roughly 20 percent of the entire Ethereum network.

@availabilitydig – The Twitter Feed of Outages - Our article highlights some of our numerous tweets that were favorited and retweeted in recent days.

The Availability Digest offers one-day and multi-day seminars on High Availability: Concepts and Practices. Seminars are given both onsite and online and are tailored to an organization’s specific needs. Popular seminars are devoted to achieving fast failover, the impact of redundancy on availability, basic availability concepts, and eliminating planned downtime.

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