What is the role of human error in data loss incidents in virtual environments?
Lobo: One of the most common types of data loss situation that we see is when whole virtual machines are deleted. Where before a company could lose a single server due to a RAID problem, in a virtual environment 20 to 30 servers can become inaccessible at the same time. We did a job for a company in the U.K. banking industry where they were carrying out some maintenance work to their virtual environment. They had a replication system set up between the main and disaster recovery site, but before going into maintenance work they didn’t stop their replication work and they managed to format one of the data stores containing probably between 15 and 20 virtual servers. When that happened, the replicated site also got formatted, and at that point they realised they didn’t have a recent backup for an Oracle database containing very critical data. They first contacted the storage vendor and VMware, and when they were not able to get the data back, VMware came to us. On this occasion, we had t
