ACE Data Recovery Retrieves Data From IBM System Storage Dynamic Disk Pooling

ACE Data Recovery LLC completed a recovery case from a multiple IBM Corp. storage expansion units managed by IBM systems storage with Dynamic Disk Pooling (DDP) organized in a single drive pool hosting VMware VMDK files.

The DDP dynamically distributes data, spare capacity, and protection information across a pool of disk drives. This particular IBM storage subsystem was utilized by a large healthcare system in west Texas – five facilities were affected. However, human error can cause the best units to crash. The failure caused critical patient, doctor and other healthcare official’s data to become completely inaccessible. The healthcare system’s director stated that this was must-have data and failure was not an option.

After initially contacting different data recovery companies, the healthcare system’s director selected the company as their data recovery service provider. His decision was based upon his research of company’s past experience with complex storage arrays recovery and his initial consultation with Don Wells, GM, ACE Data Group. Other significant reasons included Data Recovery’, A+ BBB rating, no diagnostic fee and a ‘No data – No charge’ guarantee. The diagnostic revealed that the chained SAS disk drive enclosures metadata tables were corrupted, preventing host storage OS to access raw data. The total drive pool physical space, involved in the recovery process, was 108TB.

“This was the most complex recovery we have had for the last couple of years,” stated Wells.

Yevgeniy Tolkunov, CTO, ACE Data Recovery, gathered team of tier 3 engineers. The R&D team reverse engineered the IBM Dynamic Disk Pooling data structure and deciphered the metadata tables to achieve successful access and extraction of all VMs from the storage pool. Their efforts resulted in 100% recovery of the critical data with over 238 VMware files with patients’ critical documents, X-Ray images, and SQL database files.

Tolkunov stated: “ACE Data Recovery R&D department has a lot of technical expertise in various storage and server recovery and can develop custom solution to retrieve data from storage systems that seem unrecoverable to our competitors. Our engineers gained a lot of technical expertise that will enable faster recovery times for future projects of this magnitude.“