John has a Windows 2008 server he uses for file and print services within his organisation. The server provides all of the storage for his business documentation, client records, and key financial details of his 1200 accountancy business customers. This information is critical to his business as an accountant. The files stored on his server are particularly important in December and January, John's busiest time for completing quarterly VAT returns and personal tax returns for his clients.
However, on the 20th January this year, the RAID controller in John's server failed, causing a random write corruption of his data.
John called his one-man-band IT support provider (let's call them OMB Inc for the sake of argument - no relation to any real company) to get the system fixed as soon as he realised he couldn't simply reboot the server to fix the problem. Unfortunately he couldn't get hold of OMB Inc immediately, but as John knows they're usually very busy he left a voice mail.
By lunchtime the next day, John still hadn't heard back from OMB Inc so he called them again but still got diverted to voice mail. Again John left a message, stressing the urgency as his clients would expect their tax returns to be completed on time otherwise John would be liable for the fines heading their way!
As it was now weekend John decided to leave the issue until Monday morning, but vowed to chase the it up 1st thing with OMB Inc to make sure he had the time to complete the work on behalf of his clients.
So at 9am on Monday morning, John called OMB Inc yet again to try to get his problem solved. Again the call was answered by an electronic lady asking him to leave a message and to press 1 for more options. Unfortunately, John knew that pressing 1 wouldn't get his system up and working so he called us here at Eitex.
Now at this point, we were coming in to a situation cold. We knew very little about the set-up and configuration of John's systems and very little about the problem other than John's machine was down and wouldn't come back up in any useful way.
Our engineer arrived on-site about 11am and spent the 1st hour identifying the problem and attempting to fix it to no avail. After this time, he realised we would need replacement parts so we ordered them through our approved partner program for urgent next-day delivery - John was happy to pay for this.
The next day, our engineer was waiting on the doorstep for both John and the parts. Once everything had arrived, the parts were fitted, tested and the system was brought up. At this point, the engineer along with John performed some integrity checks on the disks and filesystems and to their horror discovered a corruption of the data.
Obviously, having the system up and running was a major step forwards but without a good backup John was in a terrible pickle.
Luckily though, the tape backup solution John had been using proved, in this instance, good enough to recover the majority of his data. The only actual loss were the updates and changes made on the day of the crash, which had to be made again.
Happily, through a combination of hard work and long hours John managed to complete all of his client's work before they were hit by late submission fines. And you'll also be pleased to hear everything is OK with the chap at OMB Inc - he was happily away on a 10 day skiing holiday in the French Alps at the time. When he eventually called John on the 29th January he was politely informed that his services were no-longer required.
(This story is a work of fiction based on real events. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)
