So I posted this over at Poker Road but I wanted to get the word out as much as possible on the various forums and since Donk Down Radio has been covering UB alot lately I figured I would post it here as well.

"So I just finished listening to the last time Seebs was on "The Rabbit Hunt". He said that he would offer up the server(s) that had the missing hand histories on them after what must have been some sort of disaster(?). I am thinking that I would very much like to take him up on that assuming a few questions could be answered and I could have access to the IT dept at UB to answer any questions related to how this happened.

The Questions: (Seebs, you might want your IT guy with you on these)

1. What happened to the offsite backups? and or tape library(Surely your IT Dept does offsite backups...right?)

2. What about your mirrored SAN? (I am assuming that A multi-million dollar company who is responsible for very large data sets that a SAN would be in order.)

3. What did your hardware vendor do to help recover the data? (Assuming you have a SAN, All large SAN providers such as EMC stand behind their overwhelming redundancy features and if you lose data like that they are MORE than willing to help recover

4. What data recovery service did you hire to have the data restored? (There are many companies out their who WILL recover data no matter what has happened to your physical storage, even if it has to be done via an electron microscope.)

5. If I was to examine the hardware in question how would you be able to prove that it was indeed the hardware that failed and lost the hand histories? Would there be some sort of asset tracking documentation that could help verify it?

Now I would like it stated that I in no way have an axe to grind in any way shape or form, I am a big fan of Seebs, Poker Road etc. I just have to question what I perceive as a pretty bold statement that UB lost the hand histories due to a technical snafu in what should be very much an enterprise IT operation. Really the only way this is true is if UB is running a very rag tag IT shop, who only kept the data on 1 RAID array and did not do any type of backups or mirroring and didn't know that a data recovery service would be able to get the data back.

For example, at my hospital we have an enterprise IT dept and we are MUCH MUCH MUCH smaller than UB, we also handle very large data sets full of customer information and records and for that we require a very large SAN which we have mirrored to second EMC SAN, these things are so redundant that losing data would be a challenge. We also do nightly offsite tape backups as well as have a backup data center in another state that we backup to nightly. But let just say ALL of this failed and we lost a large chuck of our data, we WOULD have to get it back NO MATTER WHAT, because honestly it can be recovered somehow.

Now if a small hospital in the state of Montana has this type of IT dept and storage setups, then UB should have 10x the setup and staff that we do."