Missing Dell® EqualLogic™ LUNs Recovered via Remote Data Recovery.

A large municipal event center in the US lost data on a Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN configured with in a RAID 50 running VMware ESXi™ 5.5

A large municipal event center in the US lost data on a Dell® EqualLogic™ iSCSI SAN configured with in a RAID 50 running VMware® ESXi™ 5.5.

VMware snapshots filled up the datastore causing the system to crash. The customer attempted to delete one of the snapshots, but after four hours of processing without success, they had to give up. Working with VMware support, they were able to get the VMware ESXi 5.5 host to boot, but were missing critical data from six of the iSCSI LUNs. This system was unique because it was using the EqualLogic LUNs as raw device mappings (RDMs) attached to the guest instead of the traditional virtual disks (VMDKs) on VMFS datastores.

The event center called Ontrack at noon on a Saturday for emergency service.

Highly-trained data recovery engineers connected remotely to the EqualLogic LUNs using their proprietary remote data recovery (RDR) solution and started assessing the damage. During the evaluation, the engineers were able to locate the snapshots containing the missing data and virtually apply them to RDMs. Once the snapshots had been applied, the Ontrack engineering team was able to access the underlying NTFS volume, virtually repair the NTFS corruption, and extract the data.

Within 12 hours Ontrack was able to reunite the customer with the lost data which totaled over 250,000 files (-250GB of data)

Within 12 hours Ontrack was able to reunite the customer with the lost data which totaled over 250,000 files (-250GB of data).

“I was most impressed with the customer service I received from Ontrack throughout the data recovery process, the speed at which all the data was restored and the fact that during the entire restore process we were able to have our live environment up and running.”