Data Center Storage Nightmares!

Halloween is around the corner and that means it’s time to sit by the campfire and tell scary stories. What kind of scary stories do engineers at ATTO Technology tell? Why, they share Data Center Storage Nightmares!

The worst nightmares revolve around the loss of data which comes in several, equally chilling forms. Sometimes the data is there but it is scrambled beyond repair. Other times the data never made it to the storage device. How can this happen?

Sys admins and data center managers who are dealing with a technology poltergeist can be led to exasperation trying to determine the cause of their woes. They may exclaim “the only explanation is that this place is haunted!” In many cases, they are closer to the truth than they know because while the server room itself might not be haunted the cables inside the server room are!

There are many tales of weird behavior, poor performance, and data corruption or complete loss after hardware upgrades. Architects spend days trying to figure it out and all the while those innocent looking cables smile. The cables, though, are actually data center imps, able to cast spells causing everyone to forget about them during upgrades so they get reused, only to begin their chaos when the installation is complete. They may look good and they may test fine but the only cure is to throw out the old and install new cables.

Humans, too, are often the cause of data center heinousness. With only the flickering of LEDs and the dim blue haze of a sleeping monitor to light the room, our engineers related many stories where humans, whether under a spell or not, were the cause of data center heinousness.

Ever wonder why there are “No Food or Drink” signs all about the server room? What about rules over letting non-admins access data center workstations? The basement facilities of many an enterprise still echo from the lamentable shrieks and howls over these very two transgressions.

We’ve heard told too many tales of forgetting to update or even install drivers. Was it bewitchment or perhaps temporary amnesia? We’ll never know. In other cases, Ethernet settings were ignored which can lead to instabilities and even packet loss.

Did you hear the story of the broadcaster who thought their installation was ready to go, only to discover on-air, live, that they failed to exercise all of the gremlins from the system? We won’t confirm or deny this tale…or would that be tales?

Of course, there’s the ghastly mistake of poorly constructed or over-burdened RAID storage used as backups. When a write is unable to finish due to a RAID failure, the blood-curling screams from the IT Manager’s office can send chills up your spine!

And when a backup, for whatever reason, isn’t complete, we know where that leads: no recovery at all! One victim was a popular image website that lost all of its customers’ uploaded assets. Another victim was a feature film post-production group that lost power while working on a long editing session – they lost everything. Even schools aren’t immune. One, in particular, found all of the data on their senior class gone after a failed write.

Our engineers have seen it all, but nothing they’ve shared has shaken them. They say most of these nightmare scenarios could be avoided just by talking to ATTO Technology.