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RAID Recovery is a Part of Doing Business

I don't think I ever knew the power of raid servers until I first adopted a raid five server array at our company. My boss was looking for a backup solution that works well with the various kinds of mission-critical platforms that our employees deal with on a day-to-day basis. I had run raid 4 on a couple of boxes at home, as this was during the time when hard drives were still quite expensive for the amount of storage you would get. So once I did the research into storage platforms, I decided on the raid five platform because it seemed to be so ubiquitous. There is definitely a lot of stuff in the technical forums about the raid platform, so I figured we'd be safe from any kind of situation in which we needed professional raid recovery. Turns out that I was actually quite wrong about this, as we have had a couple of hard drive failures and needed to contact a professional company. But, it's a part of doing business.

Searching for RAID Recovery

I always giggle when I do a search for raid recovery at my favorite search engine. So many of the top 10 results tend to be geared around software companies that offer really expensive products that are supposed to recover your raid when you have a failure. I'm sure that a lot of this software is very good and that a lot of time has gone into the development of it, but I always laugh about the fact that software typically will not work when you actually have a physical hard drive failure. And yet, all of these companies market their software as if it will somehow be able to bring a dead hard drive back. I know better than anyone that this is not the case. A long time ago I tried using some of this raid data recovery software and it turned out to be a huge fiasco. Not only did I lose my data, but my server was corrupted forever.

RAID Recovery Isn't Cheap

One of the biggest businesses I think for most of the recovery industry is raid recovery in general. I know that a lot of data recovery companies will take hard drives for pretty much anyone in order to pad their revenues, but I think there is nothing as rewarding as when they get a raid 10 server from a company. You don't have to be a genius when it comes to computers to realize that dealing with such a complex platform means that the fees are going to be pretty high. Not to mention the fact that in a lot of cases the raid recovery have to be banned by rebuilding the hard drives in the disk array one by one, often with parts from the manufacturer. We all know how expensive it can get because it involved a lot of man hours, as well as specialized skills and experience. As a result, the cost can be very very high.

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I Needed Fast RAID Recovery

I don't think that many administrators can understand just how brutal the raid recovery situation is until they end up being in one. At their very essence, raid servers are simply not supposed to fail in general. These are supposed to be very robust solutions that are practically self-contained backup servers. But unfortunately, it seems like when you buy a raid server, it's possible to get a bad lot of hard drives. This means that if one hard drive fails, you're probably going to have another one follow soon after. I had this happen with one of our raid five servers the other day that was running an exchange platform. I don't know if your company runs Microsoft exchange, but I can tell you that a lot of people depend on it pretty much every minute of the day. So when you have a situation where you need to recover the server is on, you have to move fast.

Our RAID Recovery Shop is Great

I've been on record as saying that if there was one technology disaster that I could prevent that would save our company a lot of money into any situation in which we require professional raid recovery. I have looked at backup technologies for quite a while, and it seems like nothing is robust enough to ensure that our raid servers are protected 24 hours a day. What's more, it seems like the raid controller manufacturers are getting better at manufacturing their equipment, while the hard disk manufacturers are getting worse. These drives are bigger than ever, yes, but on the other hand all that means is that all of this data is at risk. The hard drives aren't any safer for data in general and this is a huge problem that I think a lot of administrators have to deal with it. All I can say is that I am very glad we have a great radiator covers shop to deal with.

Good RAID Recovery Protocol

I have dealt with servers for quite a long time and my job, and I do have to say that probably my favorite set up right now is the RAID 10 set up. I have seen a lot of multidisc array setups in my life, but I do have to say that the raid 10 is definitely 200% better than the raid five setup. But if I could only find a way to ensure that I wouldn't have to deal with calling for raid recovery now and again, I would be very happy guy. But unfortunately, it seems to be the nature of the game that we end up with at least one array failure every month. It's gotten to the point where I actually have a pretty good protocol with our raid data recovery provider, and it makes this process go a lot smoother. But still, I really wish that the raid system builders would make their systems a little bit more robust.

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RAID Recovery Professionals Were There

I can say that after the problems we had at my work this week, I am very glad that raid recovery professionals are there for you when the chips are down. We had a full raid failure last week, and to top it off the raid server was running the company's Microsoft exchange platform. One of the things about Microsoft exchange that is known throughout the industry is that pretty much anyone who depends on it, depends on it heavily. So when we have a situation where there was an actual hardware failure in the exchange server, I had to hack quickly in order to assure my bosses that the data would still be there in 24 hours. This is the kind of failure that freezes an organization and creates a lot of stress for the management. Fortunately, my boss and I have a good relationship and I was able to calm him down.

Tough Situation for Me

Of all the situations that I've ever seen as a manager of a server bank at my company, probably one of the toughest ones I've had to deal with was a situation that required raid 5 data recovery. I thought it was very prepared for a real hardware failure, and had a number of tools lined up in order to ensure that I could get the service back online quickly. We do operate a very robust backup plan, which is of course necessary for pretty much any organization today. But unfortunately, sometimes the backup machines fail or you find that the failure in your hard drives take place much later in to the backup cycle. I think this is more common than a lot of people think. Fortunately, a friend of mine told me of a professional raid data recovery company that could recover our data quickly and put us right on our way.

Exchange Recovery Guidance

I have a lot of computer hardware that I'm in charge of for my company, as I am the key administrator for a number of departments. Most of the time, my job consists of me helping users with some of the software products that are company uses, including exchange and our Oracle database. These programs are not that difficult to use, and they are pretty easy to teach. Unfortunately, however, the raid servers that house both of these platforms have been giving me a lot of difficulties lately. In fact, I actually had to call a company in order to get exchange recovery services recently. I frankly expected that the whole situation would be a lot more difficult than it was, but the data recovery technician I spoke with was actually very cool. He helped guide me through situation that could have been really bad for not only me, but the company.