Guest Blog: Heliostor, on “Simply Data Migration”

30 years ago, we shut down our servers early on Friday evening and drove 150 miles to our new location with a car full of tapes. After a weekend of acclimatisation, building logical volumes, mounting filesystems and loading tapes all through the night, we were there. Our shiny new Sequent cluster was stood up with all 200GB of data restored and services up and running. Not once in the process, while we started and restarted job after job did we consider that there could be a better way!!

10 years later we had it sorted. Backups and restores over a network, how easy was that?? NFS mounts, dd’ing and tar’ing volumes and filesystems to remote locations, how clever were we?? What next? Array replication, concurrent replication, cascaded arrays, compression, deduplication …..virtualisation, IP and FC bandwidth growth, QoS, convergence, all playing their part in the movement of this data explosion around the world. Giant leaps forward and just as well; I am not sure how many of our customers would tolerate their systems down for 64 hours while a team of consultants migrate 200GB data.

Can it get simpler still? 30 years of advances since I set off on that day and new methods keep coming. The Cirrus DMS appliance has taken it to a new level again. Simply plug this into your existing fabric and seamlessly bring it into the data path keeping all your systems online. From here, you can migrate your data to any new array that you please, out to another datacentre or even onto the cloud. No expensive swing kit (even free loan kit is expensed somewhere), no reallocating storage through another layer and all completely heterogeneous. Gone are the days of expensive licenses to escape vendor lock down.

Cirrus data haven’t stopped here, Transparent Datapath Intercept (TDI) is their patented technology that makes them unique and they are extending their product portfolio as the company continues to evolve. TDI powers all of their solutions, enabling live deployment with ZERO downtime. TDI products are 100% transparent to all Client Hosts and Storage. For more information on how you can reduce the disruption, effort, risk and cost of data migrations or for a live demonstration, contact us at info@heliostor.com.