SAN File Corruption Case Study

Employing over 500 staff at 13 offices throughout Wales Countryside Council for Wales is the Governments statutory advisor on sustaining natural beauty, wildlife and the opportunity for outdoor enjoyment in Wales and its inshore waters. 

CCW broadcast an email to all members of the Sell 2 Wales Government Procurement system requesting assistance with a serious file corruption issue which was occurring over night. New Technology File System (NTFS) file corruption had been reported on the Microsoft Windows front end server which connects all users to the Storage Area Network (SAN) document store. 

File corruption had caused damage to user data three times and was affecting user’s confidence. David Bowen agreed that Micro Plus Computers would be engaged to assist with resolving this issue.

Identifying and resolving the problem was a very high priority to ensure end user confidence was restored.  Working in conjunction with Microsoft, Micro Plus Computers were able to confirm this was not a Microsoft Server issue and requested a conference telephone call with the SAN hardware support company. After this communication the SAN hardware company having originally given the SAN a clean bill of health found a hard disk drive fault that was causing the array to continuously rescan. This rescan caused a huge performance bottleneck from which the SAN could not recover causing the NTFS errors to be reported. 

The faulty SAN hard disk drive was replaced and the NTFS errors were no longer being reported and user confidence has now been restored.