Happy new year and welcome to Random Short Take #49. Not a great many players have worn 49 in the NBA (2 as it happens). It gets better soon, I assure you. Let’s get random.

• Frederic has written a bunch of useful articles around useful Rubrik things. This one on setting up authentication to use Active Directory came in handy recently. I’ll be digging in to some of Rubrik’s multi-tenancy capabilities in the near future, so keep an eye out for that.
• In more things Rubrik-related, this article by Joshua Stenhouse on fully automating Rubrik EDGE / AIR deployments was great.
• Speaking of data protection, Chris Colotti wrote this useful article on changing the Cloud Director database IP address. You can check it out here.
• You want more data protection news? How about this press release from BackupAssist talking about its partnership with Wasabi?
• Fine, one more data protection article. Six backup and cloud storage tips from Backblaze.
• Speaking of press releases, WekaIO has enjoyed some serious growth in the last year. Read more about that here.
• I loved this article from Andrew Dauncey about things that go wrong and learning from mistakes. We’ve all likely got a story about something that went so spectacularly wrong that you only made that mistake once. Or twice at most. It also reminds me of those early days of automated ESX 2.5 builds and building magical installation CDs that would happily zap LUN 0 on FC arrays connected to new hosts. Fun times.
• Finally, I was lucky enough to talk to Intel Senior Fellow Al Fazio about what’s happening with Optane, how it got to this point, and where it’s heading. You can read the article and check out the video here.