Sonasoft presentation. Slide 22
Posted on 06/22/2014 4:58:40 PM PDT by smoothsailing
The blogosphere has been alive in the last 48 hours with the sound (smell?) of smoking gun, after the revelation late last week that at the time of Lois Lerner’s remarkably convenient computer crash, the IRS had a contract with a company named Sonasoft for email back-up and archiving services.
The IRS contracted with Sonasoft from 2005 to 2011. Sonasoft’s niche in the IT services world is explicitly organizing and backing up email files on Exchange and SQL servers, which the Sonasoft sales pitches point out are an increasingly unwieldy problem for IT departments and users. As a state-of-the-art solution, Sonasoft offers SonaVault, a software package whose properties are so on-point for the catastrophe that supposedly stalked the Lerner emails that it’s positively ridiculous.
Consider some of the verbiage from this 2010 presentation on the benefits of SonaVault. The slides are reproduced below; the pitch homes in on the requirement for companies to be ready for litigation and “eDiscovery,” or searching for and producing, on demand, the electronic records of relevant email transactions.
Sonasoft presentation. Slide 22
Sonasoft presentation. Slide 25
Of particular note, beyond the extremely pertinent focus on organizing email data to respond to litigation and discovery requirements, is the highlighted portion on Slide 28. It points out that SonaVault provides a customer with continuous email archiving, even when a primary email server “fails over” to the standby server. In other words, there is never any reason to fear the loss of archived emails.
Sonasoft presentation. Slide 28
The record at USASpending.gov verifies that the IRS had an annually renewed contract with Sonasoft at the time of the supposed loss of Lois Lerner’s emails, in June 2011. Patrick Howley beat me to the finish line to report (at TheDC) that the Sonasoft contract was terminated shortly afterward. The annual contract, which had been renewed in September 2010, expired without renewal on 31 August 2011. The IRS-Sonasoft relationship was severed altogether on 8 September 2011, with a de-obligation purchase order.
So that’s awfully interesting. Whatever Sonasoft’s obligations after the contract was terminated, it’s clear that the company had a relevant contractual obligation to the IRS at the time of the supposed email loss. There seems to be no question that Sonasoft’s knowledge of the email “catastrophe” needs to be investigated.
Strange politics
But there’s more to this drama – and it’s (go figure) political. Sonasoft is a small company, founded and run in Silicon Valley by a Mr. Nand (Andy) Khanna. It isn’t clear whether Andy Khanna is any relation to Rohit (Ro) Khanna, a Pennsylvania-born attorney who served as an Obama appointee in the U.S. Department of Commerce, and is now a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in the 17th district of California (in Silicon Valley). But what is clear is that the two other members of Sonasoft’s board of directors – the members other than Andy Khanna – are both working hard to get Ro Khanna elected.
Here are the players. On the Sonasoft board of directors, Dr. Romesh K. Japra, M.D., is the chairman of the board. The board director is Mr. Romi Randhawa, whose day job is president and CEO of HPM Networks, another Silicon Valley IT company.
And then there’s Ro Khanna. Khanna has connections to Obama that go way back, to Obama’s first run for the Illinois state senate, when Khanna was at the University of Chicago as an undergrad. Will Burns, a Chicago Democratic political operative, recruited Khanna to walk precincts with Obama during the campaign, and Khanna was reportedly star-struck:
“He was probably the first politician I’d met,” Khanna continues. “My recollection is that he was an exceedingly decent, gracious person, and that there was a lot of buzz around him as the future mayor. At the time, people talked about Obama as the next Harold Washington—who was, to be clear, viewed with extreme reverence. They thought Obama could be the next black mayor of Chicago. That got me interested in politics.”
Bloomberg-BusinessWeek writer Joshua Green compares Khanna’s first encounter with Obama to Bill Clinton’s storied encounter with John F. Kennedy. (So you can see the direction Green’s political profile, which touts Khanna as “Silicon Valley’s Wannabe Obama,” is going.)
Khanna ran a doomed campaign for the House from Silicon Valley in 2004, tilting quixotically at entrenched Democrat Tom Lantos on an anti-Iraq War platform. That run garnered him connections among top Democrats, which, along with his early link to Obama, made him an obvious pick for a deputy assistant secretary job at Commerce when Obama took the White House.
Perhaps coincidentally, Khanna left the Department of Commerce in August 2011, the same month that the Sonasoft contract with the IRS expired. (And, just to clarify, there is no obvious evidence that Khanna had or has a direct connection with Sonasoft, or the IRS Tea Party-targeting policy.)
In October 2011, Obama crony Vinod Khosla, the legendary venture capitalist, hosted a donors’ dinner for Khanna’s next run for Congress. Khanna’s committee raised over $1 million for a proposed 2012 run against aging Republican Pete Stark. But Khanna pulled out of the race early.
The 2014 campaign connection
After the 2012 election – and this is what really caught Joshua Green’s attention – Khanna began preparing for a new campaign in Silicon Valley, this time with the biggest names from the Obama 2012 campaign team on his roster. Khanna is making another run in 2014 against an entrenched Democrat (seven-termer Mike Honda), but he brings major firepower, especially for a guy you’ve probably never heard of:
What makes Khanna more interesting than your typical underdog is who else he has in his corner. On April 2, when he announced that he would challenge Honda, he also revealed that the people who will be running his campaign are many of the same ones who just got Barack Obama reelected. Even though Khanna has never been elected to anything, he has managed to sign up one of Obama’s top-three fundraisers, Steve Spinner, as his campaign chairman; Obama’s national field director, Jeremy Bird, as his chief strategist; and the president’s media firm, pollster, and data-analytics team, along with assorted other veterans of the reelection. Their aim is to build at the congressional level the same type of campaign they ran for Obama. It’s as if Bill Belichick and the staff of the New England Patriots decided to coach a high school football team.
Somebody really wants to get this guy elected. And the interesting thing is that two of Sonasoft’s three board members appear to be in the middle of it.
Romi Randhawa, CEO of HPM Networks, is perhaps of lesser interest in this regard. His main appearance was as joint host of a fundraising reception for Khanna in October 2013.
But Romesh Japra, a high-profile figure in Silicon Valley’s Indian-American community, seems to be playing a bigger role. Besides being one of Khanna’s major donors ($7,400 since 2011), Japra has been implicated in a byzantine effort to run multiple Republican candidates in the primary, and thus divide the GOP vote so that Khanna and Honda, the Democrats, face off only with each other in November 2014.
California adopted a non-partisan “jungle primary” system via Proposition 14 in 2010, and the Golden State’s primaries now advance the top two vote-getters, even if they’re both from the same party. If you want to make an intra-party challenge to a strong incumbent, the most effective divide-and-conquer strategy may well be an across-the-board “more the merrier” approach.
Republican candidate Vanila Singh, running for the 17th district seat this spring, had the GOP field to herself, until a pair of high-profile Khanna supporters encouraged another Republican, Joel Vanlandingham, to join the campaign late. One of that pair was reportedly Romesh Japra (see last link above).
The primary result on 3 June was satisfactory for Khanna supporters, although things might well have turned out the same without Vanlandingham as a spoiler. Honda and Khanna will have the race to themselves in November.
The peculiar thing, in any case, is Sonasoft’s collateral connectedness to the Khanna drama, on which the Obama machine has left such distinctive fingerprints. It doesn’t seem to signify anything more than the web of vaguely icky crony connections that characterize so much of government and politics today – regrettably, on both sides of the aisle.
But it’s one more thing for the “If Republicans did this there’d be a major outcry” column. Democrats have done it, however, so we may never know the whole story.
As soon as I heard about this company I assumed they were linked to the left, just like the 0-care website contractor. Nothing will be found.
“We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re going to reward our friends” - aka Obama
If the IRS was using MS Exchange then her own hard drive is of no importance. Does anyone know if this was the case?
They were using this product, which is for backing up MS Exchange.
Plus this IRS document refers to Exchange - http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html
Of course it also says backups are required and some records are federal records.
Are you starting from scratch? Even though IRS is using MS, they are claiming they never had an intention to back up all email. Pretty much left to the users to handle.
That’s their story.
you can bet there is no trace left behind.
why didn’t the goofus investigator ask for this stuff to be impounded to start with.
That story (IRS explanation) is in direct violation of Federal Law.
If SonaSoft is advertising that they were the IRS Email archive service, yet they only kept 6 months worth of emails, they can be prosecuted for violation of the Federal Records Retention Act.
The IRS’s excuse is to claim they ignored the Records Retention Act at all levels, again a criminal violation.
I think we are on the edge of an abyss that could expose criminal activity all the way into the Oval Office.
Funny, I saw a report that the contract with Sonosoft HAD BEEN CANCELLED.
So, what is the truth. Did they get cancelled .. and if so, who in the govt has sent them a cease and desist order to preserve ALLLLLLLLL emails from the IRS or to the IRS ..!!
If not, I fear the same thing has already happened, and the destruction of documents could have already happened. SOMEBODY BETTER GO TO JAIL IF THIS DID OCCUR.
My best outcome would be a secret production of all the email which NSA has been collecting .. carried into the hearing room and placed in front of the those who have been called to testify. Of course, these would have been gone through - and the bombshell emails would have been removed .. ready to show to those who say .. move along, nothing to see here.
And .. if more of these emails are destroyed .. and we end up not able to prove all the horrible things done by the IRS .. I believe two things will happen .. Nov 2014 will be more of a blow-out than predicted .. and after that legislation will be forthcoming to TOTALL DEFUND THE IRS. FIRE ALL THE EMPLOYEES .. AND START OVER.
In fact, I’d like a repeal of the 16th Amendment.
The record at USASpending.gov verifies that the IRS had an annually renewed contract with Sonasoft at the time of the supposed loss of Lois Lerner’s emails, in June 2011. Patrick Howley beat me to the finish line to report (at TheDC) that the Sonasoft contract was terminated shortly afterward. The annual contract, which had been renewed in September 2010, expired without renewal on 31 August 2011. The IRS-Sonasoft relationship was severed altogether on 8 September 2011, with a de-obligation purchase order.
Sonasoft works for Microsoft SQL Server < — > Microsoft Exchange Server
So, to the extent that the IRS uses Sonasoft, it’s where the IRS is using Microsoft Exchange Server.
Using Sonasoft, the full e-mail message (stem to stern) is stored in a Microsoft SQL database (that is using a Hard Drive Array as the physical storage media), while a “stub” of the e-mail message is stored on a Microsoft Exchange Server, and the user sees that “stub” listed in the Outlook window on the user’s workplace computer.
The user has only to click on the “stub”, and the full message is downloaded ... Sonasoft- Microsoft SQL Server — > Microsoft Exchange Server — > user’s workplace computer — > Outlook program.
The Sonasoft sales pitch, is that the e-mail is always backed up, and the e-mail archive is always available ... instead of being on tapes stored away on shelves that have to be manually accessed for recovery. Also, because the complete corpus of the e-mail is not stored on the Microsoft Exchange Server, then the backup of the Microsoft Exchange Server uses less storage space, takes less time, and costs less.
Other backup software *could* back up the Microsoft Exchange Server itself, with all, or portions of, what it holds.
The Microsoft SQL Server collection of an organization’s e-mail, exists on a Hard Drive Array, and the matrix, in effect, of Sonasoft < — > Microsoft SQL Server < — > Hard Drive Array is replicated at least once, existing on some other Hard Drive Array at another geographic location.
To wit: The organization’s e-mail in full, exists on at least 2 Hard Drive Arrays, 1 ea. at different geo-locations, and it’s all live.
If at Hard Drive Array A, drive “A001” fails, then at Hard Drive Array B, the replication of “A001” ... being “B001” ... still has the data. One presumes, that the loss of “A001” does not take down with it, the remote “B001”.
The Sonasoft Way, is to always have at least an A and a B, but there is no limitation on having further replication: C, D ... and still keeping for long-term, some hard drives or tape drive media.
Still, we are given to understand, that if the IRS was using Sonasoft for maintaining Lerner’s e-mails, then BOTH A and B would have had to fail, in order to justify “the hard drive crashed, and thus ‘no e-mail.’” With the exception, that a command could delete all the e-mail, if a higher-up with policy authority allowed the command.
Something like that.
Bkmk
Chuckle chuckle. Freaky lookin guy.
I am about to burst your bubble.
0bama turned off the security features of his Campaigns Credit Card processing software. Millions flowed in from overseas unsecure accounts.
The crimes have piled up ever since.
Holder will not prosecute
http://government-contractors.findthebest.com/l/65751/Sonasoft-Corporation-in-San-Jose-CA
Detail on contracts won by SonaSoft
Oh, I know that Holder won’t prosecute. But they still may be exposed.
And they're sticking to it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.