Business Challenges:

“The outage happened on a Saturday evening. Our CTO contacted me on Skype asking if there was a problem with email,” Keller recalled. “There was and it wasn’t just the email server—it was five servers, including our virtual Exchange server, all running on a
VMware host.”

Because it was a weekend, there wasn’t quite as much impact as there would be during the work week. So while Keller knew he had the onQ recovery node as a fallback, he decided to minimize data loss by trying to repair and bring the Exchange server up in its
current state. That was the idea, anyway.

“It was just a driver bug. I repaired the corruption to the Exchange database but once we got the hardware performing correctly, there were other knock-on effects.” After laboring over his original plan, he decided his most valid option was to boot up the onQ recovery node. “Everything just worked on the first try. At that point, I realized I could have saved two days of work by going to the recovery node first instead of trying to breathe life into the crashed system for such a long time.”