Exactly our profession

A short story about a support incident that happened exactly like this. For the sake of the customer, however, we have removed the name.

It was around 9 p.m. on a Thursday evening when sales representative Thomas Heigl from the Enterprise Storage Solutions team received a call from his good customer. It was long after closing time, but given the good relationship of trust with this partner, he naturally answered the phone.

The resolved customer reported a failure in an eminently important system: After a shutdown, the production server could no longer find the SSDs from the RAID set. Thus 100 percent data loss. Super disaster! For the customer, the system house and also for Starline. After all, our ambition is to always provide optimal support for the systems we deliver.

Known how

As an experienced project manager, Thomas immediately realized that it was highly unlikely if the damaged RAID set had been caused by the simultaneous failure of multiple disks. The failure had to have occurred at a more central point.

The all-clear was already given by the hastily called Starline supporter Patrick Weber: He was sure that it could not be a matter of defective drives due to the error pattern. The technician expected that the failed SSDs would switch back to "online" and that the RAID configuration could then be re-imported.

After consulting several support experts from the companies involved and discussing other possible solutions, the decision was made in favor of Patrick's plan.

Lo and behold, SSDs that were set to Failed came back online immediately. The hard disks, however, did not respond as quickly, so one of the hot spares had to step in. Half an hour later, however, all RAID sets were running again, which was followed by DataCore virtualization and then the VMs booting.

At 11 p.m., it was clear that there was no data loss and the entire system was working regularly again. Last but not least, the happy customer thanked the Starliners for their commitment at such an unusual time.