The Importance of Data Mobility as Code

Connecting the Dots In Your Storage Transformation Journey

Ask any Chief Information Officer (CIO) about their top priorities, and you’ll likely hear a list that includes cybersecurity, privacy, AI, cloud, automation, and integration technologies. Some of these are new initiatives, but the overall mandate is generally consistent—harness technology to streamline repetitive processes, increase your company’s productivity, and enable faster revenue growth. Peel the layers back a bit further, and data management is at the heart of the mission. Data remains the most important asset for most enterprises worldwide, and data mobility is becoming central to how businesses compete.

How a company manages, stores, accesses, and moves its customer data can determine the success of its customer relationships and the customer’s lifetime value. Analyzing customer data in real-time to respond to changing trends is critical, and without immediate access to stored customer information, the business can fall behind. Unfortunately, a PwC Pulse Survey found that 82% of CIOs surveyed said their companies struggle to realize value from technology investments. It is an alarming statistic but not surprising. We consistently hear from businesses of all sizes that the challenge starts before the new storage is brought online.

The Problem with Current Storage Implementations

It is a familiar scenario: A vendor introduces new storage technology to the business unit that will revolutionize their operations and reduce cost. After a series of trade-offs and complex negotiations, the technology is ordered. Only after the storage arrives does the question of how to move the existing data onto the new storage often arise. Then, there are a series of critical questions that must be answered. Are the systems interoperable? How much downtime is required? Will data be lost in the process? Will the process interfere with my daily processing and customer experience? With critical questions looming, it isn’t uncommon for the technology to arrive and sit untouched for months while a plan is created. It isn’t uncommon for data mobility to almost be treated as an afterthought once the hardware purchase is completed.

Historically, bringing storage online and moving existing data into that new environment was exceedingly difficult and risky. Companies often delay upgrading their storage environments well past the end of service life because of concerns about the risks and impact of migrating the data and the associated downtime. And changing virtualization solutions was something that didn’t happen. Virtualization vendors locked enterprises into their technologies by making the migration process so arduous and risky that it wasn’t worth any potential cost savings.

Realizing Value Sooner

Cirrus Data offers a different approach to data migration with a data mobility solution designed for businesses to seamlessly migrate their live block workloads, applications, and operating systems without the risk of human error, lengthy delays, or unmanageable downtime requirements. Gone are the days when data migration was an event that required the business applications and data to be offline while hundreds of manual and repetitive tasks were completed for every storage array or hypervisor migrated. Today, enterprises can seamlessly and non-disruptively modernize their storage environments without the risks of human error, data loss, or extended downtime.

There is no longer a requirement to wait for maintenance windows to perform a data or compute migration. Businesses can now migrate live data from legacy storage to a new system without taking applications offline. Our patented pMotion™ functionality allows scheduling the final cutover months or even a year after the data has been migrated to the new destination storage a possibility. In specific environments, achieving a full cutover with zero application downtime is possible thanks to the Cirrus Data patented Transparent Data Interception (TDI) technology. With TDI, there is no rebooting, no reconfiguring multi-path drivers, and no need to modify existing SAN zones. Whether your network is fibre-channel, iSCSI, or both, Cirrus Data provides a unified data mobility solution to migrate data locally in your data center, remotely, and to or from the cloud using native encryption and compression.

The ability to start migrating data immediately dramatically impacts the ROI of new technology investments. Instead of wading through 12 – 18 months of migration windows, manual tasks, and business unit concerns about data loss, enterprises can now start seeing the value of their new investments and realize the intended cost savings starting immediately. Cirrus Data offers a data mobility solution designed for live data migration in any direction, with built-in enterprise-scale intelligent automation, which makes the process fast, secure, and reliable – without complication. The right data mobility strategy can make all the difference and significantly improve the storage investment’s ROI.

Intelligent Automation | Data Mobility as Code

While having one data mobility solution to securely migrate between leading storage vendors and cloud providers is a huge step in realizing the value of technology investments, more is needed to solve the risk of human errors or alleviate the work that comes with hundreds or thousands of monotonous, manual tasks prone to human error. The manual effort of migrating hypervisors has helped keep one vendor the dominant provider in the market for many years. With enterprises searching for a solution to move hypervisors quickly, Cirrus Data introduced its latest offering –  MigrateOps™ for data-mobility-as-code.

Cirrus Data’s MigrateOps™ is an enterprise-scale intelligent automation solution for block storage workloads. Built on Cirrus Data Cloud™, MigrateOps is engineered to help organizations create, manage, and scale the automation of migrating their data, workloads, and virtual environments. With MigrateOps, businesses have a secure foundation for data mobility automation that is flexible, consistent, and proven. Organizations will operate more efficiently, deploy new storage solutions to reduce costs faster and free up precious resources for innovation.

With Cirrus Data Cloud’s MigrateOps, you can migrate live data with one click. Whether you are migrating to the cloud, moving to a new hypervisor, or adopting a new hybrid cloud architecture, with just a click, you can migrate, transform, and manage your block storage in a safe, consistent, trackable, scalable, and repeatable process.

Start Realizing Value Faster from Your Technology Investments

For enterprises focused on data modernization and taking advantage of new technologies, it is critical to bridge technology silos. Bringing existing data onto new storage platforms and creating “always-on data mobility” will enable businesses to realize the value promised faster from their new technology. Additionally, by rapidly creating a modern digital data mobility platform, these businesses will be able to continue to innovate and outpace the competition.

Connect with a data mobility expert and start generating positive ROI from your storage investments faster. Click here.