SAN Goes South: DriveSavers Prevails with SAN Data Recovery

Ask any IT professional what the fastest, most reliable and durable storage device is and you’re likely to get the same answer-RAID. Nevertheless, for all the benefits RAID devices have to offer, they are still misunderstood. Many believe them to be infallible. The truth is RAID devices can and do fail frequently.

Jonathan Gass, IT support specialist at a Kentucky community and technical College in Louisville has nearly 15 years of experience managing multiple servers and storage arrays. He supports six campuses in four different counties.

One particular device on the college network was a five-disk, two-terabyte SAN configured as RAID 5, which offers redundancy and the ability to rebuild a data set using parity information stored across multiple drives. The system was used to support 500+ employees, providing primary storage of the professor’s grade books and critical financial records for the business affairs department.

Two of the five hard drives in the SAN failed simultaneously and the timing couldn’t have been worse, occurring on the first weekend of December-just one week before grades were due. Worse, all regularly scheduled backup sessions had failed and others were discovered to be very old.
After a recommendation from the SAN’s manufacturer, everything was in place to have it shipped to DriveSavers. But, at the last minute, the procurement department demanded that Jonathan utilize their existing support contract with an outside vendor who partnered with a different data recovery firm.

Three days later, Jonathan received a phone call and it was not good news. “We’ve never seen a problem anything like this,” the tech at the data recovery firm told him “…unfortunately you’ve lost all data.” Without holding much hope, Jonathan had the device shipped to DriveSavers for SAN data recovery.

Jonathan feared the worst when DriveSavers phoned a few days later. Instead, he heard three inspiring words: We got it! “When we received the data, it was amazing, said Jonathan. The data recovery was 100 percent successful. I love the fact that the engineer took complete ownership from beginning to end.”

Asked if Jonathan would recommend DriveSavers he responded, “DriveSavers is permanently programmed into our speed dial. I experienced a fantastic level of professionalism and optimism from everybody at DriveSavers. If you suffer a data loss on a SAN or other storage device, DriveSavers are the people to call.”