HP StoreVirtual Centralized Control Management Console

The above might sound like a bit of a mouthful and indeed to those who aren’t familiar with it, it can be. Here at Glasgow Data Recovery our engineers are indeed familiar with the HP StoreVirtual Centralized Control Management Console and the manner in which it brings a whole host of hardware storage devices together to function as one large unit with continuity and overall stability assured.

There are occasions however, as our engineers can attest, when things go wrong and the Control Management Console will either fail itself or fail to recognise certain ‘nodes’ attached to it across the networked array. The HP StoreVirtual Centralized Control Management Console allows its users to take one or more storage ‘nodes’ made up of a number of drives internally and links them together to produce clusters that are accessible via iSCSI and therefore accessible across a networked setup which includes server running your applications and storage ‘nodes’ that hold the data you and your staff are working on.

At Glasgow Data Recovery we have been asked by some of our clients to assist with the recovery of data from storage ‘nodes’ that are no longer accessible as the result of problems that have arisen from the HP StoreVirtual Centralized Control Management Console.

This may be because the storage ‘nodes’ or some of the drives within them have failed or because of issues involving the LUN (logical unit number) which is an allocation of a portion of drive space or the drive as a whole. A failing LUN will be reported by the HP StoreVirtual Centralized Control Management Console as unusable and as Hewlett Packard themselves have stated since the system’s inception in 2008, unrecoverable.

At Glasgow Data Recovery our engineers have developed a method by which the information on these ‘nodes’ and their constituent drives can be recovered to a new media which was something previously HP said could not be done. Indeed HP have said that such a thing was not possible because storage ‘nodes’ from both the HP P4000 and P4500 were unrecoverable.

Now obviously we cannot give away our trade secrets here but what we can tell you is this; at Glasgow Data Recovery our engineers have developed a method of reconstituting your information from a damaged ‘node’ using a process of reverse engineering; using forensic techniques which ensure the data is recoverable to a new media in a reusable and accessible form.

Those familiar with the HP StoreVirtual Centralized Control Management Console will know that by incorporating it into your SAN (Storage Area Network) you can add additional ‘nodes’ (blocks of storage made up of sets of hard drives) as and when they are needed and this can be a cost effective way of increasing the size of your IP network without breaking the bank.

However you will also be aware of the time lost in terms of man-hours trying to reconstitute data from such a setup should one of the ‘nodes’ fail or register as having failed when used in conjunction with the HP StoreVirtual Centralized Control Management Console.