Data Migration Speed Isn't About Speed

When someone asks, “How fast can your product migrate?” it sounds like a simple question, but it rarely is. In fact, this question reminds me of LeBron James famously saying, "Two points ain't two points."

(https://x.com/SInow/status/99279112364617318)

Similarly, in migration, speed is rarely about data throughput. It’s all about the total time needed to complete the migration project, from planning through to final cutover.

Over the years, we've learned that “migration speed” means something different to everyone. Typically, people aren’t really interested in the maximum possible raw data transfer rates. Instead, they want to know how soon their workloads will be running smoothly at their destination. Whether it's a new compute platform, new storage unit, or even a new datacenter after a long-distance remote migration, the real goal is minimizing the total timeline.

Why Data Migration Speed Isn't About Data Transfer Speed

A fast data transfer rate is beneficial, sure. But in reality, data copying alone rarely dictates the overall migration timeline. You'd be surprised how much time is spent before the first byte of production data is even copied. Far more time is spent on essential yet often overlooked tasks, including comprehensive preparation to understand the scope and complexities involved, extensive training sessions for teams managing the migration, rigorous testing and validation phases to ensure reliability, carefully planned and executed cutover procedures to minimize risk, and continuous coordination among numerous stakeholders such as:

• Host owners

• Application owners

• Storage administrators

• Security teams

• Networking teams

• Infrastructure managers

• Cloud providers/vendors

Additionally, navigating thorough security approval processes requires considerable effort, meticulous attention, and effective collaboration. All these factors impact almost every migration project. In the grand scheme, data transfer speed has a much smaller impact on the timeline than you might initially imagine.

So, when someone asks, "How fast can Cirrus Data's product migrate?" we always respond, "It depends." Of course, we provide examples based on tests conducted by industry experts and real-world case studies, but we emphasize, "It's not just about transfer speed." Here's what we've learned from our experience delivering migration capabilities that truly maximize "migration speed."

Minimizing the Amount of Data You Actually Need to Migrate

One powerful insight we've gained is that the quickest migration often moves the least data. Reducing unnecessary data transfers directly shortens the overall timeline. This requires precise, accurate tracking of changes so you migrate only what's absolutely necessary.

This approach has made block-level tracking popular in the industry. One notable example is VMware’s Change Block Tracking (CBT). Despite its known limitations related to supported storage configurations, scalability, or performance overhead, it remains widely popular and is used by many home-grown and commercial migration tools.

At Cirrus Data, we leverage our patented Transparent Data Intercept (TDI) technology. We provide block-level tracking not confined to VMware environments, allowing support for virtually any storage and compute environment. The goal isn't simply block-level tracking itself but accurately determining what data needs to be migrated.

Maximizing Available Migration Time

Another critical insight is that if you can’t further reduce the data volume needing migration, the next best approach is to expand the available migration time safely. Think of this as boosting your income if you can't cut spending further.

The industry-standard approach, typical of most purpose-built migration or replication products, provides precise, granular scheduling capabilities. This allows administrators to define migration windows carefully, throttle bandwidth usage during business hours, and increase it during off-peak times when resources become available. However, even the most granular scheduling still has limitations. Static schedules and throttling frequently fall short in real-world scenarios because they lack the adaptability required by dynamic production environments, potentially causing disruptions or unnecessarily prolonging migration timelines.

To address this, one of the core features across all Cirrus Data migration products is Intelligent Quality of Service (iQoS). iQoS dynamically adapts migration speed in real time based on actual production workload, optimizing migration performance without impacting production workloads. By intelligently adjusting migration operations in real time, we effectively increase usable migration windows, achieving quicker overall completion without production disruptions that often result in pauses or restarts of migration projects.

Minimizing Human Overhead with Automation

One of the largest hidden costs in migrations is human overhead for tedious tasks. Manual configuration, training, error recovery, and oversight dramatically slow down migrations, especially at scale. Automating these processes greatly accelerates timelines and improves outcomes.

This realization led us to create MigrateOps, our data mobility-as-code automation platform. Similar to the benefits of many automation and orchestration platforms, such as Ansible and Terraform, you typically learn once and then migrate anywhere. While it may initially take slightly more time to become familiar with the platform and start the first migration job, the efficiency gains multiply significantly as project scale increases.

Typically, migration time estimation is measured by "time per host" or "time per application", etc.. With automation, this is no longer the case. Instead of "45 minutes per host," once you're familiar with the platform, you might spend 60 minutes thoroughly understanding the environment, developing a migration configuration, and triggering a test migration job. Once initial planning is validated, the remaining 50,000+ hosts can be migrated in parallel with minimal modifications and no further human intervention required. As a result, the time savings could be exponential as a migration project scales up. Automation also unlocks several additional benefits across your data mobility strategy. (Learn more here.)

Maximizing Efficiency in Everything Else (Outside of Data Transfer)

No migration technology, regardless of sophistication, can eliminate inherent delays caused by external processes such as firewall approvals, security validations, stakeholder coordination, and compliance checks. These processes, necessary as they are, often represent the longest phases of migration.

Addressing this requires streamlined management, clear visibility, and efficient coordination. Our solution is the "single pane of glass" management provided by Cirrus Data Cloud. Centralized visibility simplifies stakeholder engagement, security approvals, and infrastructure readiness. Additionally, flexible connectivity options (like the ability to connect from destination to source while migrating data from source to destination), robust REST API integration, and specialized secure deployment modes (like the private edition for dark-site configurations) further accelerate these external processes.

Conclusion

Ultimately, true migration speed isn’t measured in gigabytes per second; it’s measured in momentum. At Cirrus Data, we’ve redefined what it means to move faster by focusing on the full journey, not just the copy process. By eliminating unnecessary transfers, expanding usable migration windows, automating complexity, and removing barriers beyond the data path, we empower organizations to accelerate transformation without disruption.

This is the new standard for data mobility: predictable, efficient, and built for scale. That’s why the world’s most demanding enterprises trust Cirrus Data to lead them forward.