DriveSavers DR Platform Chosen by Unknown US State School District

DriveSavers Data Recovery (DriveSavers,
Inc.) was selected to perform a data recovery on the centralized storage system
for an entire state school district’s system.

The system was only four years old and huge – twelve VMs stored on fourteen
RAID 5 systems running ESX 4 servers clustered in a SAN storage environment
that distributed all the school district’s data across 70 HDDs. Another data
recovery company attempted to recover the system’s data and claimed it was not
possible. Although there was residual corruption, DriveSavers was able to
recover the bulk of the data and save the school district from the catastrophic
failure.

"Virtualization
is a boon to organizations who want to increase their storage efficiency and
agility," said Trea Kines, senior enterprise recovery engineer at
DriveSavers. "But
storing all your data in one location leaves it extremely vulnerable if you are
not prepared for system failure, data loss and the need for data recovery. Our
engineers at DriveSavers are experts in analyzing, understanding and resolving
complex data loss issues that can occur in virtualized data storage
environments."

The school district’s enterprise system
lost six of its enterprise drives in staggered failures during a power surge,
and there was a hardware replacement of a problematic switch. Normally, this
failure would be sustainable in a degraded state but there were additional
complications. Two failed drives were located in the same RAID-5, corrupting
the metadata, causing a cascading effect. The SAN was down. Every school in the
district was down. No student data. No administrative files. No payroll
records. Students couldn’t access term papers. Teachers could not be paid. This
data loss had wiped out everything.

The 70 drives were shipped to DriveSavers
in two large crates. Before starting the recovery on the layer of VMs, the
physical drive failures first had to be resolved in the company’s Certified ISO
5 cleanroom. Then all drives had to be imaged to healthy drives, the corrupted
data on the SAN network had to be restored and the RAID rebuilt. No
small feat considering that these arrays use their own special algorithms to
store the data randomly across the drives. After significant engineering
effort, the SAN was up, the cluster rebuilt and twelve individual recoveries
were performed to verify the data on each of the VMs. The school district’s
data was safely recovered, and the administration and schools were able to get
back to business again.

Kines states: "The recovery was as complex as it gets. So much was on the line and
security was top of mind, considering the data held confidential student and
employee information. To add to everything else, the original manufacturer had
embedded a proprietary file system into the VMs. Our proprietary recovery
methods and tools and technology alliances with VMware and other leading
storage manufacturers contributed to our ability to recover the data from this
enormous system quickly and securely."