Customer Success Story: Significant Reduction in Migration Time Using DMS

Recently at Cirrus Data Solutions, we have been concentrating on growing channel relationships with OEMs as well as systems integrators and VARs. Our partners recommend DMS when their customers are migrating from third party storage, thereby ensuring that data migration is quick, seamless, and secure. This was the case not long ago when a Pure Storage customer, one of the world’s oldest stock exchanges, was migrating from Hitachi Storage that was nearing end of lease to Pure Storage.

The organization’s data, which consisted primarily of Oracle running on Linux, with some Windows hosts as well, was historically migrated with the proprietary tool Oracle ASM. The internal IT team was urged to stick with that solution, as it is considered a standard for Oracle database migration. Considering the customer’s other stringent requirements, including: ensuring no downtime during the migration, time constraints due to end of lease on existing storage, ensuring data integrity, and a simple solution that their own IT staff could come up to speed on quickly, Pure Storage had a better plan. Pure Storage strongly recommended trying a new tactic for this data migration by using CDS’ DMS. The risk averse organization decided to challenge the status quo and migrate with DMS.

This customer’s past data migrations had taken 12 to 18 months from start to finish due to complicated scheduling conflicts. DMS’ iQoS allowed them to migrate the data using a full 24×7 window, where other tools would have restricted data migration to quiet times. This significantly reduced the time it took for the full data migration to be performed. The migration with DMS took only three months to complete. DMS also proved simple to use, requiring only three days of training to prepare the four-person IT team to perform the data migration themselves (two at the Primary Site and two at the Disaster Recovery Site). The Oracle migration tools they had used in the past did not keep the old storage volume intact, but DMS kept a bit-by-bit copy of the data which proved very useful. When they encountered 17 blocks of corrupted data on one of the databases, DMS allowed them to revert to the old volumes quickly and confirm the source database had pre-existing corruption. They were able to revert and get right back on the migration path.

The stock exchange reported the biggest gain from using DMS was the speed of the migration. They saw a 4x improvement in transfer rates over migrations using Oracle ASM, and thanks to DMS’ simplicity, they were still able to perform the data migration themselves. The bit-by-bit comparison of the data allowed them to copy data without having perform validation of the data at the same time; DMS automatically did it all. Last but certainly not least, the migration was able to be scheduled while activity was ongoing, alleviating long downtimes and scheduling conflicts and turning a 12-18-month project into a 3-month project. The managers all agreed that the DMS did not disrupt the organization’s production environment. When performing an active migration DMS was seamless and invisible, even the Application Development Manager wasn’t aware when the migration was taking place.

This customer success story substantiates the time and cost savings of using our DMS for your storage refresh projects while migrating data from one any vendor’s storage solution to any other storage solution, as well as utilizing our intelligent QoS to migrate using the full 24×7 window. To learn how other customers saved time and money with DMS, check out more in-depth customer accounts in our case studies.