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 Lerners 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. Sonasofts 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 its 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.
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.
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 Lerners 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 thats awfully interesting. Whatever Sonasofts obligations after the contract was terminated, its 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 Sonasofts knowledge of the email catastrophe needs to be investigated.
Strange politics
But theres more to this drama and its (go figure) political. Sonasoft is a small company, founded and run in Silicon Valley by a Mr. Nand (Andy) Khanna. It isnt 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 Sonasofts 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 theres Ro Khanna. Khanna has connections to Obama that go way back, to Obamas 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 Id 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 Washingtonwho 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 Khannas first encounter with Obama to Bill Clintons storied encounter with John F. Kennedy. (So you can see the direction Greens political profile, which touts Khanna as Silicon Valleys 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 Khannas next run for Congress. Khannas 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 Greens 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 youve 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 Obamas top-three fundraisers, Steve Spinner, as his campaign chairman; Obamas national field director, Jeremy Bird, as his chief strategist; and the presidents 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. Its 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 Sonasofts 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 Valleys Indian-American community, seems to be playing a bigger role. Besides being one of Khannas 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 theyre 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 Sonasofts collateral connectedness to the Khanna drama, on which the Obama machine has left such distinctive fingerprints. It doesnt 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 its one more thing for the If Republicans did this thered be a major outcry column. Democrats have done it, however, so we may never know the whole story.
Hadn’t they already done all kinds of Gestapo stuff by 2011?
http://e-channelnews.com/ec_storydetail.php?ref=417864
Sonasoft Combines Archiving and Disaster Recovery
Sonasoft, Corp. announces the release of disaster recovery capability for its archiving solution. SonaSafe for Email Archiving is designed to meet regulatory compliance and eDiscovery needs of organizations. SonaSafe for SQL Server provides data protection and disaster recovery for Microsoft SQL Servers. By combining both the solutions, Sonasoft is the only company that provides disaster recovery, high availability and data protection for archive server through a common platform. SonaSafe Archiving and Disaster Recovery products have helped companies avoid bankruptcy and meet compliance during turmoil times and a shaky economy.
Businesses are being increasingly asked to retrieve emails during litigation. Also Companies need to comply with regulatory compliance requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. According to Sarbanes-Oxley, public companies must keep all documents and communications for seven years following an audit. The penalties for destroying or altering a document can include fines up to $5 million and imprisonment for up to 20 years. Hence, Email is becoming Achilles Heel of document and records management. In business, a computer disaster equals an event that halts the normal operation of day-to-day business activities. Events like hurricanes, tornadoes, major fires, blizzards, floods, are happening companies that do not have a proper disaster plan pay dearly through lost productivity and financial loss. It is imperative that organizations not only implement solutions to meet their eDiscovery and Compliance needs, but also protect the archive server in case of a disaster.
SonaSafeR for Email Archiving will capture all incoming, outgoing and internal emails and store them in archive databases as a Single Instance Store (SIS). SonaSafe Email Archiving solution supports Exchange Server 2000, 2003 and 2007. The archive solution stores data in SQL databases. By using SonaSafe for SQL Server, the archive databases are reliably backed up and replicated to a disaster recovery site. Both the archiving and disaster recovery solutions are built on a common platform and customers get a two-in-one solution. Typically customers have to purchase two disparate solutions from two different vendors and they are not integrated. Also, it would cost three to four times more than the SonaSafe solution.
“Sonasoft has provided me with a One-Stop shop for all my High Availability needs. When I came across Sonasoft, I immediately saw the value of their “point & click” technology, which has definitely made my life easier. It has not only cut down my recovery time to a great extent but has also given me peace of mind with its intriguing standby features. I would like to compliment Sonasoft on my experiences with not only sales but customer support as well; I got the personal attention and satisfaction I expected from them. I’m just delighted to have found Sonasoft and would highly encourage others to use it”, A.Sadr, Computer Systems Director, Office of the Provost, University of Southern California (USC).
Yes they had, and Lerner “missing” emails were from Jan 2009 to April 2011.
Thanks.
Then whoever is pressing the inquiry was badly misinformed or they would have immediately shot down the excuse about Lerner’s HD being recycled.
That would at best just be holding a cached, offline copy of the emails.
The SQL Server and Exchange hard drives would not only be in RAID configuration as you mentioned, but most likely very high capacity and also high speed, as well as being matched, plus be non-standard in that they would be designed not to do “heroic” data recovery attempts which does not work well with RAID. So they would be expensive, typically have a very long life cycle, and the possibility of them simply being trashed is very, very unlikely.
Heck, hardware is not my specialty and even I know that. What level of advisers does this inquiry have??? How could they let the IRS prattle on about Lerner’s hard drive for more than 10 seconds...
Who are these oportune douchebags?
He needs that SMIRK smacked off his face!!
It would be nice to determine if there is a family relationship here. Knowing the Chicago way, I would bet there is for sure.
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