Carbonite sues hardware maker and reseller

I would like to make sure that your readers understand two points with regard to Carbonite’s lawsuit against Promise Technologies:

1) This event happened over a year ago. We do not say this to minimize the matter. But we do want to point out that this has not happened in a long time and is not an ongoing problem.

2) The total number of Carbonite customers who were unable to retrieve their data was 54, not 7,500.

Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 2006 and 2007 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don't lose any data. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as "firmware" in the storage servers. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were completely restored without incident. Statistically, about 2 out of every 1,000 consumer hard drives will crash every week, so 54 of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. Since they weren’t completely backed up when their PCs crashed, these customers were unable to restore all of their files from Carbonite. Most of the 54 got some or most of their data back. We took full responsibility for what happened and I did my best to call each of these customers personally to apologize.

As a result of our problems with the Promise servers, we switched to a popular Dell server that uses RAID6 – an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. This configuration is in theory 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive — the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil.

So far, Promise has refused to accept responsibility for their equipment’s failures, so now we are suing them to get our money back. The Dell RAID servers have been flawless and we're extremely happy with them.

Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.

Well.. not to come across like a shill. but having owned a Promise raid adapter once, I'm happy to say you'll learn never to do it again. Running a mirror set for the OS and having the controller crap out on you and by invalidating all the data written to the disks makes you spend a hundred quid extra and buying a real brand the next time.

Dave,

I like what you had to say in response to Nick's article. Statistics are evil and can be made to support both points of view, but you spoke clearly and with good intentions; for that you have my respect.

It was my impression that RAID 6 could only support two simultaneous drive losses rather than the three you specified. See: http://www.storagereview.com/guide/singleLevel6.html

I also don't beleive that Dell produces RAID controllers. It's been my professional experience that all RAID controllers sold under the Dell name are rebadged Adapted or LSI controllers.

Evil, Dave said the company bought Dell RAID servers, not Dell RAID controllers.

I admire carboite in some ways, I assume you go straight to the local loonie bin and hire the most sorry stupidest people there. Very admirable, but maybe thats why you bought innapropriate hardware which did not offer the correct raid solution for your needs.

Evil: I think we’re saying the same thing w regard to RAID6. I think what I said was that you have to lose 3 of the 15 drives before you lose any data. So, yes you can sustain 2 drive losses and not lose any data. Couple that with the fact that the user has another copy on his PC and you have an extremely reliable system. I doubt that I’ll ever see the simultaneous loss of 3 drives on the RAID and the user’s PC crashing at the same time.

The biggest problem is human error. Our users are generally not technical. They don’t understand where their data is stored on their PCs, especially their Outlook files, Quicken files, and the like. That why most of them could never use a traditional backup system that makes you find all these files yourself. If they don’t get backed up, the user is in for a nasty surprise when they try to recover. That’s why we put so much emphasis on backing up automatically and specifically finding things like your Outlook files wherever they may be. That’s the real key to Carbonite’s success.

I have no idea where Dell gets its controllers from. We’re their largest customer for the RAID server that we use, and they have been great.

Carbonite customers’ data loss is not Promise’s fault. For some more context on this case, see Promise's response in a letter sent to customers this week at http://www.promise.com/support/Announcements.asp

We had serious problems with Promise RAID arrays a couple of years ago. However, all of our data is always replicated to multiple independent storage systems so we did not lose any data, and our customers were not impacted. We have since changed to HP SAN Storage systems with RAID 6 and hot spare drives. Like Carbonite, we also determined that the Promise systems were not reliable enough for our professional online data backup business.

The HP Storage systems have been extremely reliable and robust. Since we are in the business of providing professional online data backup services to our customers, we have architected our systems with multiple levels of redundancy. We assume all technology will eventually fail and therefore we also have means to recover from those failures.

We are not as big as Carbonite or Mozy, and we don’t offer the cheap online data backup pricing plans like they do. So we don’t have the huge volume that these bigger companies have. Our business model is very different, and more focussed on the needs of the individual customers not gaining massive numbers of customers. If you prefer a smaller company who is more focussed on providing reliable data backup service than gaining massive numbers of customers, then check us out.

Rhinoback Professional Secure Online Backup

http://www.rhinoback.com