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Turbocharge Your Cloud Migration
Tech Blog
Sep 9, 2021
In the world of cloud migration, there are plenty of “free” tools. We have found that these tools, while functional, aren’t free if you value your time, application uptime, and telco bandwidth. About everyone has some project to get some portion of their infrastructure in the cloud, and the first step is to get there from their current on-premises infrastructure.
The first step in getting there is to conduct a pilot with minimal investment to validate that the cloud is the place you want to be. Free tools help keep the costs down, and since the scale is not a factor in a trial, the free tools do just fine.
When it comes to genuinely moving at scale to the cloud, the cost of time, bandwidth, and disruption have significant costs. Cirrus Data has tested its own tool against some cloud vendors’ tools and found some remarkable results.
Cirrus Migrate Cloud
Cirrus Data Solutions introduced its Cirrus Migrate Cloud, CMC, technology at the request of our customers and partners to help customers get to the cloud quickly and easily with minimal disruption. CDS adopted its appliance-based solution that has moved 1000’s of Petabytes of data on-premises to the cloud and brought with it data reduction, encryption, and Quality-of-Service.
CMC is block storage device agnostic, giving customers a single software tool for all their block data migration requirements.
CMC is a software-based solution can significantly reduce the migration time, complexity, and cost and significantly reduce downtime, in some cases down to zero.
Measuring Cost
The cost of downtime varies significantly by customer and time of disruption. A survey by ITIC showed Hourly Downtime Costs Rise: 86% of Firms Say One Hour of Downtime Costs $300,000+; 34% of Companies Say One Hour of Downtime Tops $1Million. If your “free” tool adds downtime, the costs are real.
Labor and management costs are real as well, and as you will see, the free tools took significantly more time to move data than did CMC, increasing labor and management costs as well as increased risk of failure.
Telco bandwidth is not free either, and for large, long-term migrations, the cost can be high and interfere with ongoing operations.
Comparative Results
This section compares the performance of migration tools used by Amazon Cloud and Microsoft Azure versus Cirrus Migrate Cloud. All of the migrations used Postgres database instances simulating multiple capacity increments. Samples were sized from 1 GB through 80 GB, and we then scaled the results to show what it would take for 1 TB volumes for AWS and Azure; the results for CMC were scaled and validated.
In each case, CMC is about five times faster than the “free” tool. Bandwidth consumed is five times more with the free tools; hours consumed monitoring and managing the migration are five times CMC. In addition, there are no throttling capabilities and no in-flight security.
If you take these results to the effort necessary to move 100 1 TB volumes, the impact is even more sobering: AWS – 150 Days, Azure – 256 Days, CMC – 29 Days
CMC is available to migrate from any on-premises block source, with data in-flight encryption, data reduced, and full Quality-of-Service controls. CMC enables you to get to the cloud quickly and non-disruptively.
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About Cirrus Data
Cirrus Data Solutions Inc. (CDS) is a leading technology provider of next-generation solutions for data migration and data management. The company distributes its solutions through systems integrators, managed service providers, channel resellers, and partners, including HPE, IBM, Dell/EMC, Datalink, NetApp, Pure Storage, Infinidat, Align, SHI, CDI, Computacenter, Mainline, Sirius, WWT and many others. CDS is headquartered in Syosset, New York, and has offices in Dublin, Ireland, and Nanjing, with sales and support offices in Boston and Chicago. For more information, visit CDS online at www.cirrusdata.com.
Cirrus Data
