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CGI Disk Failure and Data Loss - UPDATE
CGI Services
Posted on: Monday 18 April 2005, 17:45
Following the problems experienced last week affecting both the Frontpage and CGI Platforms, we would like to take this opportunity to summarize the major events surrounding the disk failure on the CGI-FP storage platform, and remind customers of our intentions for the replacement CGI platform.
It was announced earlier this month that we would be performing routine maintenance on the CGI platform:-
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1113421041.htm
This work was scheduled to ensure the stability and scalability of the CGI service and amongst other things, improve redundancy and resilience until the new replacement platform takes over later this year.
At 1.00am maintenance began as scheduled, when the CGI storage disks were remounted as read-only. Our network engineers then proceeded to backup the admin partition. This proved successful however it highlighted some issues with one of the disks in the array. This is not normally something that would cause concern due to the nature of the disk pack.
Our engineers continued to prepare for the backup of the stored data prior to performing the maintenance work. Whilst assessing the size of customer directories located on the storage array, there was a simultaneous disk failure which resulted in an issue with the disk pack itself. This, coupled with the initial failure, prevented the entire disk array from being rebooted.
We made every effort to resolve the problem by liaising with the associated hardware vendors as soon as the severity of the problem became evident. After much review and analysis, it was collectively decided by late afternoon on the 15th April, that the data was not recoverable.
We would like to remind customers that for security considerations the current CGI platform is completely segregated from the rest of our network. This means that any solutions for CGI involve dedicated hardware which can only be used for that purpose.
There are currently live CGI and Frontpage platforms that can be used should customers wish to restore any of their web content. These platforms are configured as such that customer's will have no problem running any of their existing scripts or applications.
We understand that the loss of data has caused an inconvenience to those that had sites hosted on the CGI platform but would like to assure customers that we will be putting measures in place to ensure that a similar situation does not arise with the the replacement solution.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support
It was announced earlier this month that we would be performing routine maintenance on the CGI platform:-
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1113421041.htm
This work was scheduled to ensure the stability and scalability of the CGI service and amongst other things, improve redundancy and resilience until the new replacement platform takes over later this year.
At 1.00am maintenance began as scheduled, when the CGI storage disks were remounted as read-only. Our network engineers then proceeded to backup the admin partition. This proved successful however it highlighted some issues with one of the disks in the array. This is not normally something that would cause concern due to the nature of the disk pack.
Our engineers continued to prepare for the backup of the stored data prior to performing the maintenance work. Whilst assessing the size of customer directories located on the storage array, there was a simultaneous disk failure which resulted in an issue with the disk pack itself. This, coupled with the initial failure, prevented the entire disk array from being rebooted.
We made every effort to resolve the problem by liaising with the associated hardware vendors as soon as the severity of the problem became evident. After much review and analysis, it was collectively decided by late afternoon on the 15th April, that the data was not recoverable.
We would like to remind customers that for security considerations the current CGI platform is completely segregated from the rest of our network. This means that any solutions for CGI involve dedicated hardware which can only be used for that purpose.
There are currently live CGI and Frontpage platforms that can be used should customers wish to restore any of their web content. These platforms are configured as such that customer's will have no problem running any of their existing scripts or applications.
We understand that the loss of data has caused an inconvenience to those that had sites hosted on the CGI platform but would like to assure customers that we will be putting measures in place to ensure that a similar situation does not arise with the the replacement solution.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support