When his ops team was busy fixing the eBay server problem, they knew that the very survival of the company was on their backs.

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The team patching the security hole in the server is different from the one working on the October intrusion, which was achieved using an attack program hidden in e-mail, said Rick Miller, another Microsoft spokesman.

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Now, three nights a week, Zavala works as a server and has become a valued member of the Old Skool team.

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For more than a year a team of three very smart engineers set out to reinvent a server farm for the 21st century.

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Connected Data is led by serial entrepreneur and storage industry veteran Geoff Barrall and an experienced team of professionals previously responsible for the high-performance BlueArc Silicon Server and the popular Drobo storage array.

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But outside the Fermi team, the focus shifted in early 2012, when a pair of papers on the Arxiv preprint server suggested hints of dark matter within Fermi's data, which are publicly available.

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