Often it is not until you experience multiple disc failures on one or more Dell EqualLogic PS4100 will you start looking for a data recovery company to reunite you with your data, databases, virtual machines or storage pools.
Did you know that R3 can recover data and Virtual Machines from inaccessible/offline EqualLogic SAN even after your support contract has ended or told it is unrecoverable?
R3 have built their own disaster recovery lab for structured storage systems, with a team of engineers who can face the challenges of dealing with large and very large scale RAID arrays in a calm, highly efficient and crucially successful way.
Today we want to tell you about a case we had recently.
The IT manager of a multi-national corporation contacted us because one of their SAN went down after relocation from one country DC to another: it was an EqualLogic PS4100. Two disks went offline stopping several VMs hosted on the array after shutting down, traveling and being brought back online.
The backups were several days out of date due to the degraded state and bad sectors interfering with their Veeam backup task. A later look at the logs revealed the problem had been developing over several months.
The initial call revealed they were trying to introduce new replacement discs and rebuild but it had been in that state for days and was costing time and business continuity and production interruptions.
In these situations, we gathered as much information as possible in the call and gave an upfront clear cost and the procedures necessary for the recovery and timeframes.
Based on our experience we can assess the problem and often give the likelihood of recovery to the client based on their responses, often this can relieve them from the initial panic giving him the correct answers and explaining why we are the best option to recover their data.
Sometimes though there can be information that is not available to the IT Manager, especially for systems that are over a decade old or have been brought into their control from other departments or because of company or staff changes.
We discovered that, actually, the SAN was part of a much wider CLUSTER: two PS4100 were paired to work together as a single SAN but also part of a quorum. Recovering a single unit wouldn't have helped at all without having both the SAN.
The second SAN was collected, its drives were imaged and it confirmed they were part of the quorum.
The recovery of 2 faulty disks, and identifying other degrading disks after images were made ensured we had preserved the state of the disks and enabled the first array to be brought back to life.
For safety, we cloned all images to brand new fresh EqualLogic enterprise plus 2TB HDDs.
The customer was then given the option to re-introduce the SAN members into their DC and complete the recovery and copy the data needed direct to new VMs on other SAN they had been using during the disaster.
They followed our guidance and called us happy two days later confirming the data was fully accessible again and we did not need to manually extract the VM from our images which were then locked for 10 days before secure wiping.
<p class="mb-0">
Has your SAN become inaccessible due to failing hard disks or solid-state disks? Has your Dell support contract ended? Do you need help to decommission your legacy Dell EqualLogic? Call us today at <a href="tel:08009993282"><strong>0800 999 3282</strong></a> to get started with your unique case.
</p>
</div>