21 July 2009

Kroll Ontrack unveils data recovery solution for NetApp systems

Kroll Ontrack has announced the availability of a new technology to recover data from NetApp Storage Systems. The leading provider of data recovery and legal technologies products and services is able to provide support for both hardware and software failures. Ontrack® Data Recovery specialists can now offer NetApp users a trusted and viable option to address data loss for the Data ONTAP® platform. Popular among enterprises as a SAN or NAS storage solution, NetApp ONTAP (WAFL) provides users with Snapshot™ technology, which creates automated, point-in-time backups. If snapshots are purged from the storage system before the creation of a more permanent backup, data loss can occur. Kroll Ontrack’s newly developed technology allows for the recovery of these snapshots, which are no longer available to the NetApp storage system. Recoveries can also be completed following corruption to the WAFL file system or after data loss, caused by human error, for example through the accidental reformatting of volumes or deletion of configuration files. “With the development of our new proprietary technology, Ontrack Data Recovery engineers are essentially able to ‘turn back the clock’ on a NetApp FAS system and restore the data to its last snapshot state. These capabilities are particularly valuable when there are gaps between snapshots and backups, including recovering data that was deleted before the backup occurred,” said Phil Bridge, managing director for Kroll Ontrack UK. “With Kroll Ontrack, customers can efficiently and effectively retrieve critical enterprise data and avoid permanent data loss or the need for data recreation,” added Bridge. In addition to Ontrack Data Recovery’s software solution for Snapshot technology, the company also offers a hardware solution beyond NetApp’s RAID-DP™ safeguard. While RAID-DP allows for the failure of two disks in a system, Kroll Ontrack provides an additional layer of protection when more than two drives fail and before a rebuild occurs.