Customer Success Story: Partners and Customers Save with DMS

At Cirrus Data we take pride in having partners who know the value of using DMS for data migration. They advise their customers to use DMS for data migrations and are invaluable at customer engagements during migrations. For our partners, the best value of using DMS to migrate data at any customer is how simple it makes the often-complicated task of data migration. The reality is that not only is the customer saving time and money on their data migration, but our partners are as well. One partner, Sequel Data Systems, Inc. had this to say after using DMS at a customer site, “DMS’ automation made it so we didn’t have to babysit the data migration, our engineers were able to work on other projects at the same time, improving our ROI immensely.”

For over 30 years, Sequel Data Systems has provided IT infrastructure and consulting expertise to organizations in the southwestern United States. Sequel Data was called in when their customer, who is one of the largest health insurance organizations in the United States, was approaching end of lease on its HPE 3PAR storage. The health insurance organization decided to upgrade from 3PAR to an all-flash storage solution from Pure Storage. Then they turned to their trusted services partner, Sequel Data, to help them with their data migration. Sequel Data has completed a multitude of data migrations and the decision of how to migrate the data was an easy one. They were 100% confident that Cirrus Data Solutions’ DMS could migrate the data quickly and securely within the demanding time lines. CDS’ unique iQoS algorithm guaranteed the impact to production would be minimal. iQoS from CDS provides the equivalent of “automatic pause and resume” capability, based on the actual I/O conditions of each disk being migrated.

This migration only required a total of a few days of work, but because of the sensitivity of the data and the production environment, including the cutover process, the total project spanned two months start to finish. Sequel Data established three ideal off-peak periods for cutover. This timeline allowed the organization to return the legacy 3PAR storage arrays before end of lease and avoid hefty maintenance fees. With the project plan established, the DMS appliances were setup in two data centers and in only 45 minutes they were ready to kick off the replication.

In the past when Sequel had used “free tools” to migrate this organization’s data, the budget had to include a dedicated Sequel engineer onsite to monitor the data as it was copied. This wasn’t the situation for this data migration using the security enhancements that are built into DMS. Sequel didn’t have to be onsite until the cutover dates. Both Sequel and the health care organization had 100% confidence that DMS was copying the data correctly without someone being onsite to watch over it. This not only accelerated the migration and enhanced the project’s return on investment, but also helped Sequel balance multiple priorities with free engineering resources. This is a great advantage for CDS partners and provides additional budget relief in costly storage projects.

Sequel sought the expertise of the CDS professional services team throughout the migration. Sequel found that any time they required assistance, CDS’ professional services proved very helpful, especially during cut-over. This partnership contributed greatly to the overall success of the data migration. To learn how other customers saved time and money with DMS, check out more in-depth customer accounts in our case studies.