Irreverence

posted on 20 April 2008 09:22

Jon Toigo writes the refreshing, well-informed and sometimes combative DrunkenData blog about data and storage management. In a recent post he displayed four images of pages from a NetApp quote for a FAS 3040 that had a 65.5 percent discount. So much for MRSP.

In a later post the images were withdrawn (redacted) from the earlier post because Jon Toigo might have been complicit in assisting someone to break an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). He blogged: " I might be held liable for violating the non disclosure."

He couldn't afford the potential legal bills attendant on a publish-and-be-dammed attitude. So now the storage world and its brother cannot see the NetApp quote and the evidence that someone obtained a 65.5 percent discount on the list price.

Who put the squeeze on Jon T? He wrote in his blog: "No one likes feeling like they were screwed in a product purchase. Publishing this quote may have made a few people angry, both on the vendor and on the consumer side."

Anyway we can't see the quote images, those interesting four pages - only - perhaps we can.

If you run a Google Search on "How Much Does Your Storage Cost?" you receive about 651,000 hits. On the first page the fourth entry is this:-

DrunkenData.com » Blog Archive » How Much Does Your Storage Cost?

How Much Does Your Storage Cost? There is an old saying that God invented White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) because someone had to pay retail. ...

www.drunkendata.com/?p=1686 - 18k - Cached - Similar pages

There are two hotlinks in these three or four lines of text. The first is the starting line: "DrunkenData.com » Blog Archive » How Much Does Your Storage Cost?" Click on it and you go to the now altered original post.

The second is the word 'Cached' on the last line.

When Google's spiders pick up a website page they copy it into a Google cache. This has the fortunate or unfortunate property that it is a Google-held version of the original page. If the owner of the original page alters it then you can't see the original contents there. But even though Jon Toigo removed the four quote page images from his website's page, they still exist in Google's cache.

He has no ability to get Google to redact the contents of its cached copy of his original page. Someone with a pretty big stick would need to talk to Google to get that to happen.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}