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ESS Data Recovery has extensive experience with the 64 bit Xsan file
system and associated Xserve RAID and/or Promise VTrak technologies.
Xsan is robust enough that our engineers are usually able to focus data
recovery efforts on the particular RAID that failed, so that it can
seamlessly be integrated back into the SAN.
Case study: July 14th, 2008; Company X had an Xsan system comprised of 6 Xserve RAID boxes, with a
total of 12 separate RAIDs, including a mirror for metadata. The company
was using this massive storage configuration for large graphics files,
and in general the device was under heavy use. Following Apple's
suggestion, the technicians at company X decided to upgrade firmware on
all the Xserve RAIDs. This process worked flawlessly, until for some
reason, on the last RAID firmware upgrade, the disk configuration was
lost and the disks registered in the system as hot spares. To complicate
matters, the company's backups had failed the night before.
After several panicked calls to Apple, the company's technicians learned
that any sort of reconfiguration of the RAID would result in a complete
initialization (zeroing) of the data. Because of this, the company
realized that their best chances of getting the data recovered and up
and running again was to contact a professional data recovery company.
Company X contacted ESS Data Recovery and talked directly to the lead
technician in charge of RAID & SAN recovery. Together, they worked out a
plan to minimize downtime and cost. ESS dispatched a team of engineers
the same day to Company X's location, and this team performed a full
clone of every single drive in the SAN (40 drives total).
When the cloning process was complete, all of the drives were flown back
to ESS's laboratory for analysis. After an emergency evaluation, ESS
determined that the failed Xserve RAID could be recovered and
reconstructed, and within 48 hours, company X had a set of replacement
Xserve RAID modules to replace the ones in the failed array. The Xsan
software quickly picked up the new array and the SAN was back online.
The total cost of the project was more than reasonable--under
$50,000--and the saved downtime was well worth the cost to deploy
engineers onsite and use ESS's 24/7 expedited emergency service.
Xsan is a wonderful software technology that allows multiple users to
access a large amount of striped data across multiple Xserve RAID boxes
or Promise VTrak E-Class RAID Subsystems. Data recovery issues occur
when one of the subsystems fails, causing the entire SAN to go down,
since there is no redundancy built into the xsan technology. ESS's team
of experienced RAID & Apple data recovery engineers will ensure optimal
recovery results at a cost that fits your budget.
Give ESS a call today and ask to speak to a RAID specialist.
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