Data recovery from distributed SAN-systems

The idea to store data in a distributed manner has developed into an application of a Storage Area Network (SAN). SAN-systems create a huge amount of disk space achieved by integrating several servers into one system and allow to get fast parallel access to data from different servers. They are mainly used by corporate users for a reliable centralized data storing. SANs implement special file systems and particular controllers for access to storage. Several servers integrated in one system and distributed data storing method make SAN a system with high fault-tolerance and greater reliability. Nevertheless, seldom outages of the device still happen. Failure of SAN-controller, inappropriate reaction of the controller to a SAN-component failure and — what more often occurs — operator's errors resulting in data deletion cause loss of critical information from the system.

SAN-systems are unique with respect to data recovery for their non-transportability, thus excluding the possibility to take such system to a server center. Besides, these systems usually store a considerable amount of crucial information that makes impossible for the company to operate without this device during a long period of time. In case of metadata outages or failures of controller metadata the data can be recovered quite rapidly through file system reconstruction on the basis of metadata and its further copying to a safer place. If a SAN-component has failed it's possible to recover the data lost from this component only. If vitally important data have been deleted the system must be switched to read-only mode at once and you should immediately take copies of metadata and journal of the SAN-system (usually 1-10% of the whole amount of file system). Data recovery from these systems is available on remote-service basis offered by SysDev Laboratories. When you contact us we kindly ask you to tell us the file system type of SAN and send us metadata image of SAN for us to test the possibility of data recovery (the metadata do not contain any corporate information and rather inform about data distribution and file names on the SAN-system).