A few months back, you may recall, we were privileged to have Ernest Hemingway drop in with a blog post. Since June is Backup Awareness Month, we thought it might be nice to have another great American writer guest blog. So we returned to the same mysterious sources we used before – sorry, can’t reveal them! – and summoned up the great American poet and short story writer, the man of mystery and horror, Edgar Allan Poe. While best remembered for his short stories, many of us also recall having read two of his most famous poems while we were school kids, the haunting “Raven” and the weirdly hypnotic “The Bells.”
Since he lived in the first half of the 19th century, Poe didn’t have a lot of computer experience. So we sent him off to spend a few months as an IT manager in a data center that had several hundred Dell servers and a lot of backup problems. As it happens, there were a lot of data loss situations and Poe struggled with a few different ways to fix his backup and recovery problems, until he happened to come across NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup, or NSB.
His time in this earthly realm completed, Poe left the way he came, but before he vanished he handed us the following poem about his experiences, scribbled, using a quill pen and ink, on a few moldy sheets of old paper.
“The Dells”
See the racks and racks of Dells,
Noisy Dells!
What a world of lunacy their humming fans foretell!
How they twinkle, twinkle, twinkle,
With their shiny LEDs!
And my forehead grows new wrinkles,
And my brow it starts to crinkle.Lights flash red, red, red,
All my data, now it’s dead!
Oh the Dells, Dells, Dells, Dells,
Dells, Dells, Dells.
Can I back up – will I crack up? – all the Dells?
Look at all the rows of Dells,
Broken Dells!
Users screaming for the data that no longer on them dwells!
How can we then recover
What’s been lost to the abyss?
First we tried to use Symantec
To recover what was lost,
But it only made us frantic,
With its complicated antics,
To say nothing of the cost!
So we turned then to Simpana
Thinking this would do it right,
But it made me grab a hammer
As I sputtered, as I stammered,
“Get this thing out of my sight!”
And the lights, lights, lights,
Gave me shivers, gave me frights!
They stayed red, red, red,
All the data still was dead
On the Dells, Dells, Dells, Dells,
Dells, Dells, Dells.
On the useless pile of data-lacking Dells!
Hear the noiseless silent Dells,
Sleeping Dells!
If I don’t restore the data soon I’ll wind up in a cell!
What is this then? Shall we try it?
What’s it called now? NSB?
It shrinks data like a diet,
It will stop the users’ riot,
As they whine, whine, whine,
They’re complaining all the time,
And they moan, moan, moan,
And the ringing of my phone
Never stops!
They are neither man nor woman,
They are neither brute nor human,
They are ghouls!
But I must restore their data
Better sooner now than later,
Or they’ll never leave my IT staff alone!
Hit the button! It’s so easy!
Are you sure now? I feel queasy!
Can it really bring the data back so fast?
NSB! B! B!
It’s amazing! Come and see!
Data’s back, back, back!
And the Dells up in their racks
Turning green, green, green,
And I can’t believe I’ve seen
What I’ve just seen!
All our trouble now it’s finished,
Data volumes been diminished,
All the backups are much faster than before!
And when data we restore it –
NSB! How I adore it! –
It’s much faster than before it
Took forever to endeavor
(Other products weren’t as clever)
Now I simply pull the lever
And it’s done!
All the Dells, Dells, Dells,
All the racks and racks of Dells,
All the Dells, Dells, Dells,
Every one of which is well
Thru NSB!
And I yell, yell, yell,
“It saved me from a thousand hells!”
Oh the Dells, Dells, Dells, Dells,
Dells, Dells, Dells!
It recovered – like no other – all the Dells!
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