Ok. Don't panic but BACK YER FREAKING DATA UP NOW!!!
We have a Powervault 220s which we use half for the mailboxes and half for the main database server. Its on RAID 5, has just had new drives installed and the power supply scrubbed. We also have a well thought out (so we thought) backup solution using tapes and Backup Exec. Anyway, at 3.51pm on Saturday, it all went tits up. The powervault was just dead. Powered off and on again and it came back up but the drives were offline apart from the hotspare. Nightmare. That's like 90% of the business critical stuff. DELL were helpful, but not really much help - they suggested swapping power leads which wasn't it but I'm not getting at Geoff the support dude, I know how hard support can be.
We finally found a solution in the form of this link here
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=pv_raid&message.id=214&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
It would appear that there is an issue with the 220s. Problem is - the powervault doesn't look like a computer and there's no floppy or keyboard.. so the existance of firmware just didn't occur to me. I realise this is poor logic but *it just didn't* ok?? The loing and short of it is that the databases and mailboxes are corrupted. We have backups but it takes forever to restore from tape with Backup exec (6hrs for 16gig of mail... that can't be right can it??) and we lost two tables.
Upshot is I'm revisitng our backup strategy. As well as the backup exec, I think we also need to be doing differentials as well, and full backups to another server entirely so that we can restore to another machine and at least get back to work. And we need to do drills and simulated crashes. Disaster can strike anytime so BACK YER FREAKING DATA UP NOW!!!!