Kroll Ontrack Releasing Data Recovery Capabilities for VMware Virtual SAN

Kroll Ontrack Inc., a provider of data recovery and ediscovery, announced data recovery capabilities for VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN).

On the market since March 2014, Kroll Ontrack has recovered data from several HDDs that were managed by VSAN for a client in the Netherlands. In a combined team effort by Ontrack data recovery engineers from around the world, Kroll Ontrack was able to recover all the data stored in the VMs from a total of 15 disks and three SSDs.

“Since VSAN is so new, we are very proud to be the first to completely recover VMs from VSAN HDDs,” said Jeff Pederson, manager of data recovery operations, Kroll Ontrack. “With newly gained knowledge, we developed a toolset for these systems, and can now handle new VSAN recovery requests in an expedited fashion.“

In the initial VSAN recovery case, one SSD failed which caused one of the three nodes to fail, and that took down the entire VSAN storage system. As a result, four large VMs comprised of valuable business data were lost.

In VSAN architecture, a node is a server host device, which can contain up to seven HDDs and one SSD flash drive. In this case, the VSAN storage system consisted of three nodes with five magnetic disks and one SSD each. Since VSAN manages and stores all data in a combined storage pool, Ontrack data recovery engineers had to recover data from all of the 15 disks and virtually rebuild the storage pool to recover the missing data. To do so, Ontrack Data recovery engineers had to develop a new solution to find, combine and rebuild all the needed description files and log files to rebuild the desired VMs.