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« NERCOMP 2007 (Worcester, MA) | IT Blog Home | Systems Staff Projects, Tasks and Initiatives - Summer 2007 »

Recovery of "The Microwave" Network File System

Posted on June 27, 2007 4:06 PM

At 12:30PM Tuesday, June 26, one of the College's core network file systems, "The Microwave", experienced a critical failure. One of the eight storage arrays attached to the Microwave experienced a failure in its hard drive storage shelf. This caused all of the disks within the shelf to lose contact with the rest of the storage array. As a result, the Microwave went offline and IT quickly began the process of replacing the storage shelf. The hard drives themselves were not affected, and we were able to re-introduce them back into the overall file system. The reconstruction of the affected volumes took several hours, and contributed most to the extended downtime. However, because we were able to reconstruct the volumes with the same drives, we were able to retain all data that had been saved onto the Microwave up to the point of failure.

As of 2:00 PM June 27th, the Microwave has been fully restored to the point before failure. Total downtime was just over 23 hours, with the data stores affected nearly 5 Tb in size. Examples of affected services were: home directories, dept drives, web, academic, course and research shared drives, as well as affecting several other services that rely on the shared content from those locations.

We thank everyone for their patience with us as we worked through the night to bring file services back online for the community.

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