Everything that is connected to your SAN will go down if shared storage fails. We recover SAN environments (failed LUNs, corrupted VMFS volumes, broken storage pools) for businesses and IT service providers throughout Surrey and west London.
Free diagnostic with every SAN job. One fixed price in writing before we begin our work.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all electronic and mechanical work, including chip-level repairs, 50% is required upfront, with the balance only payable if we recover your data. For BitLocker, ransomware, CCTV/DVR and forensic jobs, full payment is made upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Full details regarding our costs can be found on the data recovery cost page.
The first step of every SAN job is to match the fault to the symptoms: almost everything that comes into the lab falls under these twelve categories of faults.
Enterprise shelves often lose several drives at once rather than one at a time, so each affected drive is repaired and imaged on its own first.
The block device your servers were using has gone; it is rebuilt from the pool metadata up.
When the map that turns blocks into LUNs breaks, we rebuild it from the raw structures on the disks.
When an update bricks a controller pair, there is still good data on the drives, stranded because the management layers no longer answer.
Both controllers fail together more often than the datasheets suggest, and then recovery goes straight to the drives.
The VMware layer may crash while there is nothing wrong with the LUNs underneath; the datastores and VMDKs are read out and repaired.
A provisioning mistake takes seconds; how much we can recover depends on what was written on top afterwards.
If you lose just one link in the chain, a snapshot-dependent volume collapses; we rebuild the chain at image level.
When a pool runs out of real blocks, it quietly corrupts every thin volume sitting on it.
A power event while the cache battery is dead leaves parity and data out of step across the whole group.
When a NetApp aggregate or Dell EMC pool fails, its LUN map is lost; we rebuild it from the raw RAID-group structures up.
Enterprise drives formatted to 520/528-byte sectors confuse standard tools, so we image them natively on the SAN fabric.
The problem is complex because of how SANs are stacked: physical drives in RAID groups, those groups put together as a pool of storage that is carved into LUNs, and finally a file system or hypervisor datastore layered on top (commonly Dell EMC, HP MSA/EVA, IBM, NetApp or Fujitsu hardware). The recovery process works in reverse: we start at the bottom of the stack by imaging the physical disks, build the RAID groups back up from the disk images, then reconstruct the pool metadata. Once we have recovered the LUNs we can extract the virtual machines or databases inside them. In-house IT teams and MSPs work with us on these jobs all the time, and we follow your change-control and confidentiality requirements throughout.
Remove all the storage jargon and virtually every SAN job is a VM job: what the customer wants is three critical servers up and running again, not a petabyte of raw blocks. We extract VMDK or VHDX files from the rebuilt datastores, fix those files when necessary, and, to get the business operational as quickly as possible, we can prioritise specific databases (SQL/Exchange) before the full recovery is complete.
Half of SAN recovery is merely being able to physically connect the device, so connectivity is just as important as the recovery stack:
We connect directly to enterprise storage shelves and drives using our native HBAs and interposers, with support for 520, 524 and 528-byte sector formats included.
All members of a RAID group are captured at once, and any failed member is repaired on the PC-3000 bench prior to joining the recovery run.
The vendor metadata is parsed and rebuilt in strict sequential order: RAID groups, then pools, then LUNs, then file systems.
Once reconstructed LUNs have been mounted as datastores, each virtual disk is removed from the datastore and repaired individually.
For critical SQL Server, Exchange and similar workloads, we verify them and move them to the front of the queue so that critical services recover first.
Every original drive and shelf brought into the facility remains read-only until the customer takes their unit(s) back.
If you do not see your platform listed above, it's likely still familiar: most enterprise storage solutions reuse the same building blocks under different brand names. An aggregate failure on a NetApp system or a pool failure on a Dell EMC system causes loss of the LUN mapping, which is recovered from the raw RAID groups upward. In some cases both controllers on Fujitsu ETERNUS and HPE MSA shelves fail, so recovery proceeds directly to the individual drives. In addition, enterprise disks formatted to 520/528-byte sectors are imaged natively rather than fought with standard tools.
Label each drive with the shelf and slot location it was removed from, before it leaves the rack. Enterprise arrays rely entirely upon the drive order and layout being correct in order to function. Once a quote is obtained (call 0800 689 0668 or use the free online diagnostic), post us just the labelled drives (photos of how it was configured help a lot); shelving units and controllers do not need to be sent.
Before sending anything, get a quote from us either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic. Then post your hardware to us (tracked and insured), or drop it off at our Guildford laboratory in person.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? You will need to remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive, as we are unable to remove the drive for you. We also cannot recover storage soldered onto a motherboard, such as in Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops. Only drives that can be removed from a machine and sent to us can be recovered. If you are unsure whether your device has a removable drive, please call us before sending. RAID, server and SAN drives need to be removed from their enclosure and labelled by bay. For a NAS, send the disks themselves if they are removable, otherwise the entire NAS device. An external single drive should come to us whole, along with its cable and power supply.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Please mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery, and we will call you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure as to how to proceed with sending the item in for recovery? Then simply call 0800 689 0668, or complete the free online diagnostic prior to dispatching the item to obtain your price quotation.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.