Arcserve StorageCraft platform woes continue

Nasuni Skid crash
Skid crash

The Arcserve StorageCraft data protection platform is going through an extended episode of “cloud degradation” with no end in sight.

According to Arcserve’s status page, since March 12, StorageCraft Cloud Services (DRaaS) in Australia; Ireland; and Utah, US have been unavailable. The page isn’t entirely clear but the outage may go as far back as March 9. Meanwhile, one part of the status page shows DRaaS has suffered degradation in Canada since roughly March 7.

Yes, DRaaS, as in, disaster recovery as a service. This means cloud backups stored by Arcserve may be unavailable.

The latest explanation to customers reads: “Our engineers continue to actively work on the resolution for this issue. If you have questions or concerns, please refer to the email that was sent to all affected customers. ShadowXafe customers were sent a separate email with specific instructions. Please refer to that email for more details.”

A Redditor going by the handle dartdou claims to have been a customer and said they got a call from a StorageCraft representative saying their “cloud data is permanently lost.”

The netizen went on to quote an email they claim they received from Arcserve: “During a recent planned maintenance window, a redundant array of servers containing critical metadata was decommissioned prematurely. As a result, some metadata was compromised, and critical links between the storage environment and our DRaaS cloud (Cloud Services) were disconnected.

“Engineers could not re-establish the required links between the metadata and the storage system, rendering the data unusable. This means partners cannot replicate or failover machines in our datacenter.”

The Redditor continued that they had a conversation with an Arcserve representative, who, it is claimed, said the business had hoped to recover the data but stopped when it became clear that would not be possible. The netizen also said there was no offer of compensation; instead, customers must ask to be put on a list to be considered for a rebate, it was claimed.

Private equity-owned Arcserve merged with StorageCraft in March last year. The intention was to create a single entity providing workload protection and supporting SaaS applications. Arcserve brought its UDP appliances that integrate backup, disaster recovery, and backend cloud storage to the table plus its partnership with Sophos for security, cloud, and SaaS offerings. The smaller StorageCraft has backup for Office365, G Suite, and other SaaS options as well as OneXafe, a converged, scale-out storage product. StorageCraft bought SMB object storage startup Exablox in January 2017.

We have asked Arcserve to comment on the outage and compensation options available to users. We’ll update this story if we receive a reply.