Shared storage fails all at once: when one LUN breaks, all servers attached to it go quiet, and we can rebuild your entire SAN environment. Offline LUNs, corrupted storage pools, unreadable VMFS datastores etc. We also perform enterprise server data recovery for businesses and IT providers throughout Swansea and South Wales.
A free diagnostic for every SAN job. A single fixed price quote is provided in writing prior to starting any work.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. This is true of all our services except for failure of electrical/mechanical components, chip level repairs, DVRs and forensic analysis. Our full price list can be seen at the cost of data recovery page.
Each SAN job commences with matching the symptoms to the fault causing the failure, and nearly all of what makes it to our bench will be in these fifteen.
When an enterprise shelf loses its drives in batches, we repair and image each one individually first, as if each were a standalone unit.
The storage space your servers resided upon vanishes, and it is then rebuilt upward using information found in the pool metadata.
Metadata that maps disk blocks to LUNs is damaged, so we will rebuild it from the raw on-disk structures of each disk.
An updated version of the firmware will take down the management plane while leaving the data healthy behind it.
More frequently than you are told by the datasheets, redundant controllers can die at the same time, so recovery proceeds with drive-direct access.
VMware's layer for virtual machines is broken but the LUN(s) underneath are fine, therefore the data stores and VMDKs that were lost can be recovered by parsing them and repairing them.
Provisioning slips can happen in seconds; what can be recovered will depend upon how many writes have occurred since the delete/provision.
When one part of the snapshot chain becomes corrupted then all volumes that were created based off this snapshot will also become corrupted as well, and these chains are re-stitched at image level.
The pool told each thin provisioning volume it could use more space than existed in the pool, which caused corruption throughout every single thin volume that has been configured with this pool.
A power outage that occurs during a cache write operation when the cache batteries are already flat causes the parity & data to become misaligned across the entire disk group.
NetApp aggregates and Dell EMC pools lose the LUN maps to them. The maps are rebuilt from RAID group level upward.
Sector configurations in enterprise drives can confuse common tools for recovering data; therefore drives are imaged on the lab fabric in native format.
As a mainstay of HPE's small-business SAN range, the MSA 2040 / 2050 arrives here with damaged vDisk metadata, and this is familiar restoration work.
IBM V3700 / V5000 pools lose extents when there is an event involving loss of power, and the extents are then remapped from the drives.
The target definition for that device disappeared when the box went down; but typically the backing volume will have survived so it can be extracted.
SANs are built from bottom to top: disk drives in RAID sets, RAID sets bundled together as storage pools, those storage pools sliced into LUNs, then file systems and/or virtual machine data stores atop of it all. Rebuilding a SAN will be reversing that order; starting at the drive level by imaging disks, rebuilding the RAID set(s), reconstructing the pool metadata, extracting the individual LUNs, and lastly, recovering the VMs and databases residing within those LUNs. We have experience working with a variety of products including but not limited to: Dell EMC, HPE MSA & EVA, IBM, NetApp, and Fujitsu. We can seamlessly fit our processes into your change control processes as well as your NDA requirements.
Nobody wants their petabyte of blocks back, they want the three servers that run the company. The data stores are brought up by mounting them on the reconstructed LUNs, VMDK and VHDX files are extracted and repaired, and named SQL/Exchange workloads are pushed to the front of the list for the business to get restarted while the rest of the large data set is still being copied.
SAN recovery requires enterprise connectivity as much as it does recovery tools, and the lab has both:
Enterprise shelves and drives are attached natively using HBAs or interposers, including the 520/524/528-byte sector formats.
Once any failed member has passed through the PC-3000 bench, complete RAID groups are fully captured in parallel.
The vendor's metadata is read and reassembled in the following sequence: RAID groups, pools, LUNs, file systems.
Datastores are mounted from the reconstructed LUNs and each virtual disk is extracted and repaired individually.
Named SQL Server and Exchange workloads will be verified, placed at the front of the queue and put back into operation first, before less important ones.
From when each original hard disk arrives until it is returned to you, every original hard disk will be read-only.
A non-listed platform is typically a new vendor name on the same set of hardware components that have been used repeatedly by many different enterprise vendors. Any time an aggregate or pool loses its LUN map, we rebuild these aggregates and pools from RAID group level up through the entire system. When both controllers fail simultaneously, we recover directly from the drives. We image 520 byte (and 528 byte) enterprise formatting natively instead of fighting with desktop based tools.
Label each drive before it leaves the rack with both its shelf and slot number, as enterprise environments do not tolerate variations from the established order. Once you have your quote, the labelled drives will be all that needs to be sent; shelves and controllers remain on site. Photograph the configuration of all drives before sending them, for reference purposes.
First get a quote over the telephone or use our free on-line diagnostic. The majority of customers then have their media sent to us via post, this is tracked and insured.
Do you want to send a drive from your computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please do not send the complete unit of computer or device with a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) inside. Please remove it and only send the drive itself. For a server, please remove all disks and label them by their bay. We will also not perform removal of internal drives from devices in order to access data. Also, we will not extract data from devices where storage is soldered onto the motherboard (such as T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops). Additionally, we do not recover data from phones and tablets, only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Clearly mark the parcel with the name Bristol Data Recovery, and when your media has been diagnosed we will call you immediately.
If unsure about what to post, please call us first on 0800 689 0668 (the free phone number), or complete a free online diagnostic.
Diagnostic provided at no charge. Fixed quote. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.