Welcome to Random Short Take #89. I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with the day job and acquisitions. And the start of the NBA season. But Summer is almost here in the Antipodes. Let’s get random.

• Jon Waite put out this article on how to deploy an automated Cassandra metrics cluster for VCD.
• Chris Wahl wrote a great article on his thoughts on platform engineering as product design at scale. I’ve always found Chris to be a switched on chap, and his recent articles diving deeper into this topic have done nothing to change my mind.
• Curtis and I have spoken about this previously, and he talks some more about the truth behind SaaS data recovery over at Gestalt IT. The only criticism I have for Curtis is that he’s just as much Mr Recovery as he is Mr Backup and he should have trademarked that too.
• Would it be a Random Short Take without something from Chin-Fah? Probably not one worth reading. In this article he’s renovated his lab and documented the process of attaching TrueNAS iSCSI volumes to his Proxmox environment. I’m fortunate enough to not have had to do Linux iSCSI in some time, but it looks mildly easier than it used to be.
• Press releases? Here’s one for you: Zerto research report finds companies lack a comprehensive ransomware strategy. Unlike the threat of World War 3 via nuclear strike in the eighties, ransomware is not a case of if, but when.
• Hungry for more press releases? Datadobi is accelerating its channel momentum with StorageMAP.
• In other PR news, Nyriad has unveiled its storage-as-a-service offering. I had a chance to speak to them recently, and they are doing some very cool stuff – worth checking out.
• I hate all kinds of gambling, and I really hate sports gambling, and ads about it. And it drives me nuts when I see sports gambling ads in apps like NBA League Pass. So this news over at El Reg about the SBS offering consumers the chance to opt out of those kinds of ads is fantastic news. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it’s a step in the right direction.