People in Vietnam love us.

They love us so much that the entire country has signed an agreement with Indonesia and Romania to collectively select DreamHost as their exclusive Internet partner for testing stolen credit card numbers.

Or at least it feels that way.

That’s a funny way of putting things, but it’s no joke! Those three countries combined are responsible for a startling percentage of the credit card fraud that we see.

Okay, here’s the situation:

If you do business on the internet and you want your customers to be able to pay you with a credit card – with minimum amount of hassle – you need a merchant account.

And merchants like us…well, we’re just lucky to be here. If you process too many transactions that turn out to be fraudulent, you become a risk to your merchant account provider – a liability that they’d rather not have on the books.

At the first whiff of trouble your merchant provider will start doing whatever they can to make doing business together as unattractive as possible.

They’ll send you scary letters. They’ll raise your yearly fees. They’ll take a bigger percentage out of every transaction. If you don’t shape up they’ll even suspend your merchant account altogether – preventing you from accepting credit cards directly and severely hampering your ability to do business on the Internet.

Incidentally, if you ever want to screw over a merchant, online or otherwise, file a false chargeback on your credit card. Those really, really hurt. And I believe they’re illegal. But valid or not, the end result is the same – it weakens that merchant’s long-term ability to accept credit cards at a low rate – or at all.

We take fraud prevention seriously because we have to. And, in fact, Internet fraudsters are the number one reason we stopped offering gift cards many years ago. Why take the risk on running risky transactions if the gift card codes end up being unredeemed anyway?

But that was a while ago. We’ve learned a lot since then. We’ve got new policies and procedures in place to detect fraud. We’ve taken everything that we’ve learned over the years about fraud sources, patterns, and behaviors and thrown all of that knowledge into the core programming of our fraud-detection robot which we call The Fraudinator.

Early tests of Fraudinator were promising…until the Romanian elevator repair guy showed up. It started beeping and lasers started flashing all over the place! At one point I think I saw a robot arm rise from the chaos. There was some smoke, a lot of shouting, and – long story short – we ended up settling with that guy out of court.

But it did teach us a lesson – don’t mess with Romanians. Also, constantly refine your approach to fraud detection. Good rules to live by. So we do. So should you. Doodle-dee-do.

Our fraud rates are relatively low now. And our Fraudinator hasn’t injured anyone in at least six months. So it just feels like the right time to announce that…

DreamHost Gift Cards are now available!

Again.

You can now purchase gift cards – even if you’re not a current DreamHost customer – at https://gifts.dreamhost.com/.

If you ARE a customer, just visit your web panel to make a purchase.

Gift Card ID codes are issued instantly, they do not expire, and they can be redeemed by anyone – current customers and new customers alike.

We announced the return of dedicated hosting last week, the return of gift cards this week…Everything old is new again! What’s next? I might know! I might not. They don’t tell me much, actually.

Start gifting!

A long time ago in a data center not so far, far away…

We are proud to announce (again) the re-launch of our Dedicated Server product line.  It has been about five years since we last offered a Dedicated solution – an eon in the Internet universe!

So where did Dedicated go in 2006???  I’ll be honest, I’m not going to lie.  He ran away.

Dedicated never felt like he fit in with DreamHost’s other kids.  There’s Shared – she is wildly popular, drop-dead gorgeous and is the president of her sorority.  Our second oldest, Virtual Private Server, (named after his grandfather – we just call him VPS) maintains a 4.0 at one of the Claremont Colleges, excels on the club lacrosse team, and believe it or not, he paints, spelunks, is handy with a crossbow, moonlights as a rodeo clown and can ride a unicycle – backwards.

That leaves the baby of the family, Dedicated.  He isn’t popular, he doesn’t juggle five amazing hobbies, and he doesn’t dominate academics and sports.  He used to spend most of his time in his basement bedroom playing video games, and occasionally would pop up to the kitchen to grab a yoo-hoo and a Lunchables.  Let’s just say he didn’t have much direction back then.  Well, he flew the coop to travel the world and really find himself.  Last we had heard, he was island hopping down the coast of Croatia.

Now Dedicated is back!  He’s ambitious, focused and in it to win it – not unlike Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success.

Dedicated is ready to show the business world that it takes more than just a power tie, slick hair cut, and a hot cup of Tiger’s Blood to climb up the corporate ladder.

The Dedicated Servers are available today and are currently offered in three configurations – Half Moon, Full Moon and Blue Moon.  Half Moon is the entry-level server that has a dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive.  Best of all, it only costs $69/month, and includes unlimited bandwidth and a managed backup of the site.

You may be murmuring to yourself, “hmm, what’s so great about a dedicated box?” I’m glad you asked!  Er, quietly asked yourself.  Anyway, I’ll tell you.  Dedicated Server is a perfect hosting solution when you need maximum performance.  An advanced user like a software developer could use Dedicated to run complex applications, or a business could handle monstrous databases or perform tons of geoip lookups.  In these scenarios, the customer should have sole access to the CPU and RAM resources in order for everything to run smoothly.

Choose Dedicated and go right to Ludicrous Speed.  Don’t worry, going to plaid is still in fashion, but I digress.

Dedicated Servers are available for existing VPS and Shared customers in the web panel, as well as for purchase on DreamHost.com.  If an existing customer has already prepaid for a year, then no need to fret. We can prorate your account and apply it to a new Dedicated plan.

So, if you need more performance and don’t want to share the CPU/ RAM anymore, then move out of your Shared frat house or say goodbye to your roommates in the VPS condo, and step up to your very own home in Dedicated-ville.

Home sweet home.

Written by: Brent Scotten

Uptime is everything in this business.

Unfortunately, Monday was kind of a rough day for us. You may have noticed that your sites were unreachable for most of the day.

The last time something so wide-reaching and disruptive happened was less than a year ago when we discovered, quite out of the blue, that we were hosting the website for “Draw Mohammed Day.” That was…fun. And educational. Unfortunately, the technical lessons we learned during that experience simply were not applicable to what happened on Monday.

Technically, every website we host was up and running on Monday.

However, they were mostly unreachable for much of the day.

We’ve just completed our own internal review and want you know exactly what happened, why it happened, and why we’re taking great pains to ensure that it won’t happen again.

So let’s start with…

Let’s look at the timeline.

Network connectivity becomes…quirky. Our core network begins to exhibit latency issues. We begin to investigate possible causes.

The main Cisco switch at our datacenter locked up and became unresponsive.

It’s clear the switch isn’t going to come back up on its own. We reboot it, and Cisco’s VSS (Virtual Switching System) fails over all of its traffic to our secondary switch. At this point partial connectivity has been restored. Sites are reachable, if somewhat slow.

It becomes clear that our primary switch’s configuration has been wiped clean – spontaneously – and attempts to recover it are failing.

In an attempt to recover some utility from our primary switch, we clone the config from our secondary switch with some tweaks to avoid a dual-active situation. Unfortunately that does not work.

We scrap the primary switch’s configuration – on purpose this time – and begin to rebuild it from scratch.

We enable port-channel VSL (Virtual Switch Link) on two channels. This causes our secondary switch to reload itself and makes our primary switch the active one – wiping out our configuration files again. Technically speaking, this should not happen.

We’ve restored configs to both switches. Say a few Hail Marys, crack our necks from side to side, and then discover that the chaos of the morning took down the link to our El Segundo datacenter.

Techs arrive at El Segundo and begin troubleshooting.

The link between datacenters is restored.

At this point things are looking up. Partial core connectivity is restored and we begin looking for smaller fires to put out.

Outage continues. The config on our primary switch appears to be corrupted.

Still more connectivity issues are reported. Config files are continually found to be mangled. Restoring from backups is not helpful as they’re discovered to be mostly out of date.

Not out of the woods yet, but the end is in sight. All network interfaces are audited and restored. Routing and switching are repaired. The majority of issues have been resolved.

Out of the woods. Full functionality is restored.

It means that a combination of factors, set into motion by what we believe to be a hardware failure in a key part of our network, caused many customers’ sites to be unreachable for much of Monday. Those that were reachable worked intermittently and slowly.

The fact that our core switch supervisor wiped its own configuration spontaneously – and continued to do so even after we restored and rebuilt that config manually – told us that the switch was not operating to spec and is a prime candidate for replacement.

We also witnessed other anomalous switch behavior during the recovery process that, according to Cisco, should just not be possible. We’re going through the RMA process with Cisco now.

We do. We rely heavily on Cisco’s Virtual Switching System (VSS) architecture to provide fault-tolerant network redundancy for situations just like this one. On paper, and based on our specific network environment, Monday’s problems should not have happened.

VSS should have stepped up to route traffic around the troubled hardware. It didn’t. We believe our network configuration is solid – and that VSS did not behave as it should have. In fact the VSS behavior we saw was unexpected and inconsistent with what VSS claims to be. We’ll be working with Cisco to determine the nature of the failure.

We would have loved to reach out to every customer individually, but with over one million domains hosted, that could – quite literally – have taken all year. We’d have loved to email you too, but well, we had this little network problem blocking emails.

Please bookmark and continue to check http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ at the first sign of trouble. That domain is hosted offsite and we use it as our primary means of communication in cases of any and all planned – and unplanned – service interruptions.

You may also want to follow @dhstatus on Twitter as well, as it syndicates the post titles from dreamhoststatus.com.

Unfortunately, there really wasn’t much news to share as we constantly created, installed, and reloaded switch configuration files only to have them crumble and disappear before our eyes.

Our network admins were, quite understandably, wound pretty tightly on Monday and under the gun to get things back to normal again as quickly as possible. When they did stick their heads out of the bunker long enough to pass on status updates, we piped that out to dreamhoststatus.com immediately. You knew what we knew – as soon as we knew it.

We wanted to provide as much context and detail as we could to support the events already posted on the status blog. That meant doing some serious research and analysis.

We were busy doing our own internal assessment of the situation; figuring out exactly what happened, working on a detailed accounting of what failed and why it took so long to get things back to normal. That report is now complete and that’s why we’re able to share our findings with you now.

We learned some key things on Monday:

1. First and foremost, you want to be kept more in the loop. You want to feel as if you’re staring over our network admins’ sweaty shoulders, watching pages of text scroll by on the console. We get that. And you certainly deserve it.

We provided as much information as we could during the outage on our status blog throughout the day. That’s not enough. We’ll be posting more frequently, even if there’s really nothing to report, during future large-scale service disruptions. The nature of Monday’s problems meant that we really couldn’t even guess at an ETA for a resolution, and we didn’t want to make promises that we weren’t prepared to keep.

2. We’ll work to refine our network topography so that our datacenters aren’t so dependent on each other and operate more like freestanding units and less like an interconnected web of services.

3. We’re going to be better about keeping our network config backups up to date. We’ll keep several versions on file so that we can rollback to a last-known good configuration if need be.

4. Finally, we’ll be beefing up our network monitoring situation and implementing a centralized ‘Network Health’ page that any employee can use to get a bird’s-eye view of our networking situation at any time.

You’ve earned it! You pay for 365 days of service – not 364.375. Contact our technical support team and we’ll do what we can to make it right.

We were saving the most important part for the end.

We’re sorry.

We let you down, and truly, each and every one of us here behind the blue curtain gets a knot in their stomach thinking about what happened on Monday.

Some of you weren’t able to post to your blogs.
Some of you weren’t able to work on (or submit) projects for classes.
Some of you had nothing to show at SXSW.
Some of you weren’t able to accept online orders.
Some of you got yelled at by your boss.
Some of you weren’t able to get any business done.

All of that, and perhaps more, is our fault.

We appreciate your business and value the relationship that we’ve worked hard to build with each and every one of you.

It’s our hope that you’ll stick with us as we work to regain your trust by once again providing solid, dependable, hosting services.

-Brett

Your boss is an idiot.

You, on the other hand, are not.

When tasked with launching your company’s four-page website, you knew exactly what you needed: basic web hosting. Somewhere. Anywhere.

Your boss, on the other hand, was not satisfied with simple web hosting. He told you he wanted “a server”. By which he meant “a server all to ourselves.”

“But Boss!” you protested. “We can do this for just ten bucks a month. We don’t need to spend hundreds on hosting!” He was unfazed.

“No matter, Ruffian! You’ll do my bidding, else I’ll be forced to seek another who can accomplish your tasks at a rate half that of the extortionate tribute you demand of me! Now floss my toes!”

And so you begrudgingly pulled the worn length of braided raffia from your desk drawer and began to clean the lint from the webbing of his toes.

The next morning, after your third suicide attempt, you signed up for dedicated hosting.

We’ve heard this sob story time and time again.

Most people who think they need a server all to themselves, don’t.

Most people who could benefit from a dedicated server, would be paying for much, much more than they need.

A Virtual Private Server from DreamHost is an ideal solution in nearly every situation. You can dynamically scale your server resources (and your bill) at any time to ensure that you’re paying for only what you actually need, and not for an entire server.

But we know your boss. He doesn’t respond well to logical arguments. He still wants a server all to himself. The concept of on-demand hosting resources is simply too much for his feeble brain to accept. That ignorance will prevent him from even entertaining the possibility of using VPS or cloud hosting products, because the “one server” concept is so deeply ingrained in the recesses of his mind.

In truth, we’d considered VPS to be such a powerful, customizable product that we stopped selling dedicated servers altogether in 2006!

While we’re proud of the product we offered back then (we even have about a hundred or so legacy customers still kicking around!) it seemed like the end of the road for dedicated hosting. Virtual Private Servers were the hot new thing!

And yet…dedicated hosting hasn’t gone away. It’s still out there. And it’s still in demand.

That’s because there are customers out there who do still need the resources of an entire server, who do actually need several servers, who don’t want to constantly fiddle with a resource meter, and who do ultimately end up leaving our warm embrace, dejected and saddened once they learn that we don’t offer a product to meet their needs.

“How could we have gotten it so wrong?” we wondered.

We needed to do some soul searching, so last weekend we went on a corporate retreat up to Yosemite.

For two intense nights the DreamHost management team sat naked around a campfire, wearing only smeared tribal paint and eating only what we could catch with a bow and arrow. We had a talking stick. We aired our grievances. There were fistfights. Tears were shed.

Then we came back to the office and started talking about offering dedicated hosting again.

Five minutes later we decided to do it. And so today, as the Cloud Connect Expo wraps up, we’re announcing a back-to-basics return of DEDICATED HOSTING to DreamHost!

The cloud guys at the expo were, as we anticipated, less than pleased. At one point a giant hook appeared from stage left.

But they couldn’t stop us from barreling onward with our One-Step Forward, Two-Steps Back initiative!

In about two weeks Dedicated hosting will be making a comeback as a key part of a full suite of hosting services we plan to roll out in 2011.

And it is going to be GREAT. Truly. We’ve learned a lot about the industry over the last decade; even more about what it takes to provide a functional and reliable dedicated hosting solution.

Expect to see a clear and easy upgrade path from shared and VPS hosting.

Expect to see dedicated server management and provisioning provided through the venerable DreamHost control panel you’ve come to know and love over the past decade.

Expect to quit your job because your boss sounds like a real jerk.

(We are still hiring!)

In the world of high-capacity data storage, our open-source filesystem, Ceph, is a game-changer.

And anytime anyone changes the game, people tend to get confused. And needy.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ll soon be offering advanced corporate and enterprise-level technical support for Ceph implementations.

This includes:

• Consulting and advisory services
• Custom Engineering
• Design and Implementation
• Integration into Established Infrastructure
• Installation
• Performance Audits
• Onsite Troubleshooting

All this comes to you direct from the team that financed and developed Ceph!

We are currently compiling a list of potential beta participants prior to the official launch of a Ceph support offering. Please visit cephsupport.com to express your interest and we’ll contact you when things get rolling.

Full-blown Ceph support will be available later this summer.

Hi, it’s Josh.. some of you old timers may remember me as the guy who used to write the newsletters and most of blog posts around here.

You may have noticed that it was about a year ago (exactly), that I stopped.

The reason was that my wife and I had our first child, a baby boy we named Wren on that day. March 9th, 2010. He was 3 weeks early, 7 pounds, 20.5 inches, and delivered at 12:12pm. It was honestly the best day of my life. It was also the worst.

About 11 hours after his birth, Wren stopped breathing. We were at home by ourselves in Santa Monica (we’d had a home birth, and the midwives had left about 3 hours after the birth), so we called 911. They arrived within three minutes and rushed him off to the hospital just one mile from our house, but after about three hours of nothing working they had to pull the plug.

I won’t get into all the details here. You can see everything over at wrenjones.com or Group B Strep International or Hurt By Homebirth. Since then, it’s been a pretty shitty year for me and my wife, and our families and friends. There’s been a lot of crying. A lot of looking for answers. A lot of trying again (no luck so far).

When we got the autopsy back and found out for sure that Wren had died of a Group B Strep infection, it seemed like none of our friends or family members knew anything about it. I was like “people need to know about this!” But after doing a little bit of research I realized that although most parents and lay people have never heard of GBS, everybody in the medical world already have… and it’s basically been solved. Since the 90s there’s been a straightforward protocol on how to prevent GBS, that is over 99.8% effective.

What Then?

Which left me floundering. What happened? Why us? Were we really just that unlucky?

Finally, it dawned on me that the GBS infection was really just the symptom of the deeper “disease.” The home birth itself.

When we had decided to do a home birth, I was skeptical at first. It just intuitively seemed like a risky proposition.

But… after visiting a couple different home birth providers around LA, as well as our HMO-provided OBs, I developed an analogy I could accept. “Home births are to hospital births what Whole Foods is to Safeway.” (A rich people place that probably isn’t actually any better, but at least isn’t any worse.)

I’d long ago given in to shopping at Whole Foods even though I gag at the site of Nature’s Path Organic Love Crunch.

This epiphany struck me when I saw that home births were actually more expensive than hospital births… ours was $5,200 (and they don’t take insurance), compared to basically free with our HMO. The home birth specialists stated that as long as these three key components held true, home births were actually safer than hospitals:

1. You’re low risk. No complications of any kind; no medical conditions, no twins, no premature labor, no breech, no nada.

2. You have highly trained professional midwives assisting you.

3. You have pre-arranged a backup hospital that is very close by, just in case.

I didn’t buy that it was safeR, but it did seem somewhat reasonable that if you carefully followed these rules it could be as safe. And if the experience was nicer than the HMO (and the checkups definitely were), the $5,200 seemed worth it.

I now know the flaws in each of those three components:

1. You’re low risk.

Even if you’re low risk, that doesn’t mean you’re no risk.

The math basically works out like this.. let’s say a “high risk” person has an 80 in 10,000 chance of a life-threatening emergency during childbirth and a “low risk” person has an 8 in 10,000 chance. Let’s say the survival rate of such emergencies is 25% at home and 50% in a hospital.

If that’s the case, when you’re “high risk,” you’d be adding a 20 in 10,000 chance that your baby will die. And when you’re “low risk” you’d be adding a 2 in 10,000 chance! It’s better than if you’d been “high risk”, but why add any extra chance your baby will die?

Secondly, what is “low risk”? Early on, our OBs detected GBS in my wife’s urine. They dealt with it fine (although they could have told us about the higher risk of infecting your child during birth when you’re heavily colonized!).

To them, we were still low risk because GBS is so easy to treat… the mother just gets an antibiotic IV when she goes into labor… except they forgot we were planning a home birth. For our midwives we were also considered “low risk” … mostly because they held a certain complacency about GBS, I guess because they had never experienced it personally.

You never really know if you’re low risk (especially with your first pregnancy!) until after the fact, plus when you’ve decided to go the home birth route, there all of the sudden becomes this (typically) unspoken pressure to go through with it, even if “high risk” warning signs start to appear, because to deliver at the hospital would be some kind of a failure.

2. You have highly trained professional midwives assisting you.

In the U.S., there are basically two types of certified midwives: CPMs and CNMs. What you want is a CNM: Certified Nurse Midwife.

Everything else (CPM, LM, MPH, LLC, direct-entry, state licensed, etc..) is a Professional Midwife. The differences between the two are quite large.

A Nurse Midwife is required to graduate from nursing school, and works in the health care system with real medical doctors.

A Professional Midwife needs only a high school degree and to get certified by a midwifery association.

To go back to my analogy theme, a CPM is to a CNM as a real estate agent is to a district attorney.

It is currently illegal in 23 states for CPMs to deliver babies. Unfortunately it is legal in California.

In fact, there are some studies that show that births attended by CNMs have survival rates even slightly higher than those attended by MDs. However, almost no CNMs will do a home birth… they all deliver in hospitals.

I can only assume something they learned in medical school scared them.

3. You have a hospital very close by.

That almost all Certified Nurse Midwives will only deliver in a hospital says a lot.

Being close to a hospital is not the same as being in a hospital. Believe it or not, babies can die very suddenly during labor, delivery, or even the first few days afterwards. You’re never completely in the clear of course, but the most likely day for any human to die is the day they’re born.

Our story alone should prove that being close (we live literally one mile from the new UCLA medical center NICU, one of the best in the world) is not always good enough.

Clearly, being close to a hospital is better than being far from a hospital.

So it seems pretty logical that being in a hospital is even better than being close.

And again, why add any extra chance that your baby would die?

The Sad Thing

There seems to be a teensy bit of the beginning of a trend towards home births right now, maybe it goes with the green/local/organic/global warming craze. It may seem harmless, but the problem with the whole culture of home birth though is its intense focus on the process of childbirth rather than the result.

I wish I could somehow get everybody laser focused on the most important, nay, the only important thing in childbirth. Getting a healthy baby out of a healthy mommy. I wish I could impart this to people without them having to go through what we’ve been through.

I know it’s near impossible to change somebody’s mind once it’s been made up. I also know that the vast majority of home births are always going to go fine; the numbers we’re talking about are all pretty “small”.

The sad thing is, many people will still choose to have a home birth with a CPM even if they know that they are adding a 1 in 1000 chance that their baby will die.

(That’s the actual odds! For comparison, there are an estimated 85.5 million drunken drives a month and about 11,000 fatalities a year in the U.S. That implies that in America having a home birth with a CPM is 93 times more dangerous than driving drunk.)

I’m okay with that. I just want people to make their decision educated with the best possible information.

(Personally, my advice would be to not.)

Addendum

If you’re considering having a home birth, please… you owe it to yourself, your spouse, your friends, your family, and your unborn child to consider the “unthinkable.”

Before you decide, try checking out The Skeptical OB blog by Dr. Amy Tuteur. She’s been doing this way longer than me and is much more qualified than I am to talk about this stuff.

And if you do still decide to have a home birth, please, find a CNM! (And if you’re GBS positive, get the antibiotic IV for crying out loud!)

Finally, have you ever heard (or can you even imagine hearing) somebody say, “If only I’d had a home birth, my baby would be alive.”?

Because if only I hadn’t.

Today Automattic launched Jetpack, a WordPress plugin that “supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com”. Their words, not ours. Hence the quotes.

Jetpack is a collection of eight plugins that together combine to strengthen the WordPress core and make it even more powerful. Think of it as an expansion pack. With jets.

DreamHost is proud to be a Jetpack launch partner!

Included in the Jetpack core:

• WordPress.com Stats
  “Simple, concise site stats with no additional load on your server.”
• Twitter Widget
  “Display the latest updates from a Twitter user inside your theme’s widgets.”
• Gravatar Hovercards
  “Show a pop-up business card of your users’ gravatar profiles in comments.”
• WP.me Shortlinks
  “Enable WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing.”
• Sharedaddy
  “The most super duper sharing tool on the interwebs. Share content with Facebook, Twitter, and many more.”
• LaTeX
  “Mark up your posts with the LaTeX markup language, perfect for complex mathematical equations and other über-geekery.”
• After the Deadline
  “After the Deadline helps you write better by adding spell, style, and grammar checking to WordPress.”
• Shortcode Embeds
  “Easily embed videos and more from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.”

…and that’s just the start! There’s more features in the works for Jetpack.

As of about thirty seconds ago, all new WordPress installs completed with our One-Click Installer will include Jetpack by default.

Already using WordPress? No worries – Jetpack is free. You can download it right now and start using it within minutes.

SET JETS TO MAXIMUM THRUST!

That is all.

Fate smiles upon the inconvenienced! If you weren’t able to make it out to Los Angeles last weekend to see us at SCALE 9x, don’t worry. We’re coming to Santa Clara this week to speak at CloudConnect!

DreamHost cofounder Sage Weil will be presenting Creating a Storage Cloud with Ceph.

He’ll give a primer on Ceph, assess and discuss the large-scale storage solutions landscape, and discuss how best to integrate Ceph as the supporting technology behind your most ambitious storage projects. If the session at SCALE last weekend was any indication, the Q&A session afterward will be long, informative, and exhausting (for Sage). So buy him a drink if you see him after the session, won’t you?

I’m told he also enjoys backrubs.

I’m just kidding. I was not told that. But who doesn’t enjoy backrubs?

You can catch Sage’s talk at 3:45pm, Wednesday March 9th in Grand Ballroom F at the Santa Clara Convention Center. He’ll be wrapping up the “Data and Storage” portion of the conference.