In other words, RAID is not backup.

What baffles me is that there seems to be no way for either the customer or a data-recovery company to flash a new firmware onto the drive after it has failed. Someone there wanted to spare the few millicents of copper trace for a JTAG port?!

Probably to prevent supply chain firmware changes for hacking, espionage, etc.

Hmm... I wonder what the "incident" was. If it involved something akin to an "rm -rf," then of course their replication link didn't protect them.

Perhaps they were depending on snapshotting and were not prepared for some kind of hardware failure taking out the entire storage system.