A Deep Dive for Dell/EMC Isilon Data

The situation

A client inadvertently ran a command that deleted critical files on a Dell/EMC Isilon storage array containing 270 disks totaling 2 petabytes (PB). 

The solution

After having the drives in question flown in, Ontrack’s recovery engineers began an in-depth evaluation and determined that the JIT development team would be needed to assist in data recovery from this version of Isilon. Within eight weeks of working nights, weekends, and holidays to develop a proper solution, an initial set of data was delivered to the client.

While the client was ecstatic to receive the recovered files, they also requested that subsequent tasks be done to prove that no stone was left unturned in their recovery efforts, per regulatory requirements. Ontrack’s JIT development team complied by combing through the 270 drives in search of files that matched regulatory requirements and implementing a process that would search, copy, and deduplicate specific files that were found across each disk.

After months of conducting a thorough secondary search, more than 300 million files and 13 terabytes (TB) of PDF and JPG files were produced.