The Path

Recently walked

• 護 RTO is the number that bites Resilience & Recovery · 4 min Everyone can quote their backup retention. Far fewer can honestly state how long it takes to actually get a critical system back — and that second number, recovery time, is the one that determines whether a disaster is an inconvenience or an extinction event. Why RTO is the metric that gets neglected and then bites.
• 速 When all-flash actually loses Storage & Performance · 4 min All-flash won the enterprise, and for most workloads it's the obvious choice. But "flash always wins" is marketing, not engineering. There remain specific, real cases where spinning disk or tape is the right answer — and knowing them is the mark of someone choosing storage rather than being sold it.
• 命 Lease, buy, or run it into the ground Lifecycle & Refresh · 5 min Three ways to pay for hardware, three completely different risk profiles, and a sales pitch attached to each. The right answer depends on things the vendor financing calculator carefully leaves out. A plain-language guide to the money decision underneath the lifecycle decision.
• 道 The operator's pre-change checklist The Way of Maintenance · 4 min Most outages are self-inflicted — a change that went in without the five minutes of thought that would have caught the problem. The discipline that separates operators who sleep well from those who don't isn't talent. It's a short, boring list, run every single time, especially when you're sure you don't need it.
• 警 MDR vs. managed SIEM for a small fleet Defense & Vigilance · 4 min Both promise someone watches your security telemetry so you don't have to. They are not the same product, and buying the wrong one for a small fleet means paying enterprise money for alerts nobody acts on. The honest difference, and which one a small operation actually needs.
• 網 Flatten or segment an aging LAN Networks & Edge · 5 min Segmentation is security gospel — until you try to retrofit it onto a decade-old flat network running on gear that's one config change from a bad weekend. The honest answer to "should we segment" on aging infrastructure is: it depends, and the tradeoff is real. A field guide to deciding without dogma.
• 護 Immutable backups in practice Resilience & Recovery · 4 min Ransomware's favorite move is to encrypt your backups before it encrypts you. Immutability is the countermeasure — a copy that cannot be altered or deleted for a set period, even with stolen admin credentials. Here is what it actually buys, and the gaps that a checkbox labeled "immutable" quietly leaves open.
• 速 The IOPS trap in spec sheets Storage & Performance · 4 min That six-figure IOPS number on the datasheet is true, under conditions you will never reproduce. Understanding why the headline figure and your real throughput disagree — queue depth, block size, read/write mix, sustained vs. burst — is the difference between a storage plan that holds and one that falls over under load.