RAID Configuration Recovery and Repair

If your RAID controller has had a catastrophic configuration loss due to hardware and/or operator error, and it is a Mylex family controller, then you need to contact us before restoring from backup. We have over a 95% success rate of restoring the configuration (metadata, or COD). Xyratex, SGI, MTI, Rorke, BlueArc, Inline, and other OEMs call us in to recover their customer's data in an emergency. We have worked directly with end users from the federal government to Hollywood studios.

If your logical disk(s) go offline or disappear, but the hardware is still operational, then we can help you. Conversely, if you have 2 or more dead disk drives in a RAID set, and need a firm with a cleanroom who takes disk drives apart, then call somebody else.

We charge $250 an hour to do this onsite, and $125/hr. if the situation allows us to repair things remotely. We do not charge tens of thousands of dollars or require you to pay a premium depending on how many data files or GB of data you have.

RAID Maintenance

RAID systems using the FFX, FFX2, and FF2 controllers are quite reliable ... as long as they are maintained. If some hardware fails and you do not follow proper replacement procedures, then you can get corruption in data, or worse, corruption in the metadata. Corrupted controller configuration data can manifest itself as invalid (ghost) disks, invalid LUNs, or enclosures. This can manifest itself in 50% slower performance; preventing you from adding hot spares; or causing catastropic data loss in event of a power cycle.

We have software that can detect and correct these problems, and insure that the hardware is online and performing optimally. We can also enable functionality such as background scrubbing, that corrects and repairs errors in the background 24 hours a day, on all disks, including hot spares. This insures there aren't any data consistency problems on your RAID sets, and that the hot spare disks are healthy and ready to take over in event of a drive failure. Note: Only a small number of configurators (XDAM, DAM, MSM, TPM, GAM, etc.) allow you to enable this feature, but we have the ability to turn this on, regardless of what host operating system you have.

We can also purge pesky "ghost disks" from configurations that sometimes break configurators and prevent you from being able to make changes to it without resorting to zeroing everything and starting over.

If you need a GURU familiar with Mylex RAID controller, and your supplier or OEM can't help you, then call us. We wrote the configurator that most everyone uses, and our chief architect was the person that trained most of the OEMs and VARs who embedded them in their enclosure, so we are the best resource there is.