Do You Have A Few Minutes’ Despair?

There are some moments in our lives when a few minutes can feel like an eternity. The first moments we fall in love, for example. Or waiting outside a locked bathroom after four cups of coffee. But in the case of data migration, a few minutes really can translate into an eternity.

The cause of this temporal stasis is the data migration cutover: that moment in time when business applications cut the connection to the old storage and move over to the new storage system. This process, which mostly involves switching from the old LUNs to the new LUNs, usually takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes; hardly an eternity in and of itself. But scheduling ten minutes of downtime can take months depending on what other system updates need to happen, compliance requirements, service level agreements, and so on.

The waiting, contrary to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, isn’t the hardest part. It’s the request to extend your old storage lease that proves the most problematic and painful. That conversation with your soon-to-be-ex-storage vendor usually goes something like this…

YOU: I need to extend our lease by three months because we’re not ready to cut over to our new storage vendor’s solution yet. What will that cost us?

THEM: That will cost you (insert astronomical figure here).

YOU: Really, that much? Can’t we get some kind of discount?

THEM: No. And, oops, that price I quoted you was the monthly extension price. You’ll want to multiply that by three.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just flip a switch and the new storage would automatically replace the old? Well, you can with Cirrus’ Data Migration Server (DMS). (You probably saw that coming, didn’t you?) When you’re ready to cut over to the new storage, the DMS appliance – which, you may recall, is already in the data path—can act as a virtual instance of the old storage. The applications are still pointing to the old LUNs (which are now hosted on the DMS appliance), but being redirected to the new storage. In other words, you keep the old LUNs but lose the storage—and your old storage vendor loses the attitude, which is a nice bonus.

But doesn’t that just mean that a different vendor (us vs. your old storage vendor) has you over a barrel during the cutover period? No, because we’re nice people, and because it’s a lot less expensive to keep one appliance up and running than racks of storage drives.

So now that you know more about DMS, what are your migration plans? If you’d like to learn more about our complete approach to data migration and why it’s faster, easier, and less expensive than what you’ve been doing, download our free whitepaper, “Data Storage Migration… Simplified.”