Multiple hard drive failures

Last night, sometime between 12:00 AM and 4:00 AM, during a routine maintenance window, the server hosting my sites was shut down. When it was turned back on, it reported multiple hard drive failures. This means everything on the servers was lost.

This morning, I found that our servers were still down. This was the first signs I had that everything was not right. Wondering why our server was still down, I checked my host's support site. This is what I found.

At approximately 2:00 am Central Time on Monday, November 27, the Scorpius, Taurus, and Libra servers experienced multiple hard drive failures during a scheduled maintenance window.

The purpose of this maintenance window was to move all of our shared server clients from our old back-up power solution to our new backup power system. During the maintenance window, all servers were shutdown properly. Once shutdown, the power to the racks were moved from one power source to another, and the servers were then rebooted. Scorpius, Taurus, and Libra did not boot up properly and reported multiple hard drive failure, resulting in the inability to complete the boot sequence.

Though CommuniTech.Net utilizes RAID 5 technology, multiple hard drive failure renders this useless. Therefore, at this time CommuniTech.Net is restoring data from tape back-up for all clients hosted on these three servers.

While the tape restoration will take up to 48 hours to complete, CommuniTech.net has recreated your account on new drives and you are free to begin uploading content to your account. As your account is restored, we will not restore over any files that you place in your directory.

Your Personal Control Panel and e-mail settings have already been restored.

At this time, CommuniTech.Net is not in the position to discuss compensation for the downtime resulting from these hard drive failures. We will notify all clients hosted on these servers within fourteen (14) days as to what the compensation will be.

To allow us to utilize all of our available resources to complete this task, we ask that telephone calls and support tickets not be submitted on any issue related to this situation. We will post updates in our support forums, located at www.webhosting-support.com/clientarea.

While we regrettably cannot do anything to prevent hard drive failures such as these, we do understand the importance of reliability with regards to your website, and assure you that we are taking every step necessary to ensure the quickest restoration possible.

CommuniTech.Net is in discussions with Sun Microsystems as well as IBM to determine what is causing these issues and to see what further steps CommuniTech.Net can take to prevent these situations from occurring in the future.

---