San Hard Drive Failure Storing Exchange Server Database

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Using SAN (Storage Area Network) for storing Exchange Server database provides high performance, scalability and fault tolerance. In addition, SAN meets the local drive requirement and high data throughput requirements for an Exchange Server. But as faults can't always be ruled out, Exchange database inaccessibility and faults is not an exception on SAN also. A SAN hard drive might fail and leave your database in an inconsistent state. There are some typical symptoms that indicate SAN hard drive failure that stores Exchange database. However, to restore the lost data from affected database, you need to consult Database Recovery Services experts. To illustrate the scenario, consider that you use a SAN device to store Exchange Server 5.5 or 2003 database files. You encounter one of the below symptoms when dealing with your database: 1.You observe that message queues sending messages to Exchange Server computer system appears to be empty 2.Exchange MTA (Message Transfer Agent) runs as expected and accepts messages, though the computer shows typical hard drive failure symptoms 3.When you view the system log of Exchange Server computer, it shows events with IDs 2127 and 2181 4.The messages sent are not written to the hard disk and are lost Cause The above symptoms typically indicate physical hard drive failure on the SAN device. MTA continues to run on a system running Exchange Server 5.5 even while SAN hard drive failure. Since MTA runs and is available for RPC (Remote Procedure Call), the remote server doesn't stop sending messages. In such cases, Exchange Server receives the messages, but cannot write to the hard disk as it is failed. It performs a delayed write operation and acknowledges the sending server that it has received the message successfully. Thus, the server empties the sending queue, while the message has not actually been written and thus, gets lost. Solution Possible solutions to the given problem are: 1.Install the latest updates available for your Exchange Server 2.Call a Database Recovery company for technical assistance in recovering the lost database while hard drive failure. Database Recovery Services is the manual aid provided by recovery experts in order to safely recover the lost database from failed disks by deploying high-end procedures, sterile surroundings and advanced tools.