Welcome to Random Short Take #53. A few players have worn 53 in the NBA including Mark Eaton, James Edwards, and Artis Gilmore. My favourite though was Chocolate Thunder, Darryl Dawkins. Let’s get random.

• I love Preston’s series of articles covering the basics of backup and recovery, and this one on backup lifecycle is no exception.
• Speaking of data protection, Druva has secured another round of funding. You can read Mellor’s thoughts here, and the press release is here.
• More data protection press releases? I’ve got you covered. Zerto released one recently about cloud data protection. Turns out folks like cloud when it comes to data protection. But I don’t know that everyone has realised that there’s some work still to do in that space.
• In other press release news, Cloud Propeller and Violin Systems have teamed up. Things seem to have changed a bit at Violin Systems since StorCentric’s acquisition, and I’m interested to see how things progress.
• This article on some of the peculiarities associated with mainframe deployments in the old days by Anthony Vanderwerdt was the most entertaining thing I’ve read in a while.
• Alastair has been pumping out a series of articles around AWS principles, and this one on understanding your single points of failure is spot on.
• Get excited! VMware Cloud Director 10.2.2 is out now. Read more about that here.
• A lot of people seem to think it’s no big thing to stretch Layer 2 networks. I don’t like it, and this article from Ethan Banks covers a good number of reasons why you should think again if you’re that way inclined.