When shared storage fails, everything attached to it goes down with it. We recover SAN environments — failed LUNs, corrupted VMFS volumes, broken storage pools — for businesses and IT providers across Surrey and west London.
Free diagnostic on every san job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every san job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Enterprise shelves tend to shed members in clusters rather than singly — every affected drive is repaired and imaged on its own first.
The block device your servers leaned on has vanished; it gets rebuilt from the pool metadata up.
When the map describing how blocks become LUNs breaks, reconstruction starts from the raw on-disk structures.
An update that bricks a controller pair leaves healthy data stranded behind management that no longer answers.
Dual controllers fail together far more often than the datasheets suggest — at that point recovery goes straight to the drives.
The VMware layer can collapse above perfectly healthy LUNs; the datastores and VMDKs are parsed out and repaired.
A provisioning slip takes seconds; what's recoverable depends on how much landed on top afterwards.
One corrupt link and a snapshot-dependent volume folds — the chain is stitched back together at image level.
A pool that ran out of genuine blocks quietly corrupts every thin volume sitting on it.
A power event on a dead cache battery leaves parity and data disagreeing right across the group.
A failed NetApp aggregate or Dell EMC pool loses its LUN map — rebuilt from the raw RAID-group structures upward.
Enterprise drives formatted to 520/528-byte sectors confuse standard tools — they're imaged natively on the SAN fabric.
SANs stack complexity: physical drives in RAID groups, pools carved into LUNs, and file systems or hypervisor datastores layered on top — commonly Dell EMC, HP MSA/EVA, IBM, NetApp or Fujitsu hardware. Recovery works back down that stack in reverse: image the physical drives, rebuild the RAID groups, reconstruct the pool metadata, then extract the LUNs and the virtual machines or databases inside them. In-house IT teams and MSPs partner with us on these jobs all the time, and your change-control and confidentiality requirements are ours to follow for the duration.
Strip away the storage jargon and most SAN jobs are really VM jobs: what the client needs is three critical servers back, not a petabyte of raw blocks. We pull VMDK/VHDX files out of rebuilt datastores, repair them where needed, and can prioritise specific databases (SQL, Exchange) so the business is running again before the full recovery is even finished.
Half of SAN recovery is simply being able to plug the thing in — the connectivity matters as much as the recovery stack:
Enterprise shelves and drives attach natively through our HBAs and interposers — 520, 524 and 528-byte sector formats included.
Entire RAID groups are captured at once, with any failed member repaired on the PC-3000 bench before it joins the run.
Vendor metadata is parsed and rebuilt in strict order: RAID groups first, then pools, then LUNs, then file systems.
Reconstructed LUNs are mounted as datastores, and each virtual disk is pulled out and repaired on its own.
SQL Server, Exchange and similar workloads are checked and moved to the front of the queue so critical services come back first.
From the day it arrives to the day it goes home, every original drive and shelf stays read-only.
If your platform isn't listed, it's still likely familiar — enterprise storage recycles the same building blocks under different badges. A failed NetApp aggregate or Dell EMC pool loses its LUN map, which we rebuild from the raw RAID groups upward; Fujitsu ETERNUS and HPE MSA shelves sometimes lose both controllers together, so recovery goes drive-direct; and enterprise disks formatted to 520/528-byte sectors are imaged natively rather than fought with standard tools.
Label every drive with its shelf and slot position before it leaves the rack — enterprise arrays live or die by exact drive order and layout. Ship the labelled drives only (photos of how it was configured help a lot); shelves and controllers can stay on site.
Most customers post their media to us tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
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Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.