Migrating Your Storage Data with Flash. What Now?

Mar 9, 2017

You’ve made the decision to invest in an All-Flash storage solution because it promises better performance, lower costs, and more flexibility. When you switch to All-Flash storage your mission critical app will run 10 times faster. It’s as simple as that, right? Well, not quite that simple. There are two additional things you should consider, MUST consider, before you migrate to an All-Flash storage solution. If you don’t, you may find yourself begging your CFO for more money to pay for these two critical items at the eleventh hour and no one wants to be put in that position.

Here’s two considerations you might not have accounted for in your initial data migration plan:

Now your storage is super-fast and your FC fabric is too slow.
How are you going to migrate to the All-Flash storage without significantly impacting the apps? How much downtime is it going to cost? Can you migrate to All-Flash without putting your enterprise data at risk?

It is a common belief that you must choose between a fast migration or a non-disruptive data migration. This is the ultimate dilemma of storage migration. The problem exists when the destination is All-Flash storage that is virtually immune to random writes and therefore can digest migrated data at super high speeds. We find that typical data copying algorithms that migrate data from your old storage to the All-Flash can be at risk of overtaxing the production storage bandwidth. You will love the speed of migration, but your app owners will not be pleased with the disruption. Is there a way to have your cake and eat it too?

Cirrus Data believes you can have the best of both worlds with the right technology. We recommend Brocade’s VCS Fabric technology to solve the first issue. Be sure to account for the purchase of these next generation FC switches in your initial storage migration budget. The other missing piece is a low-impact storage migration from your old storage to All-Flash storage and Cirrus Data has that covered with our Data Migration Server. Our DMS eliminates the need to choose between speed and impact on performance. We offer a fast migration that is low risk and 100% transparent to the existing production environment. Our approach to balancing migration performance and production I/O bandwidth impact is completely different. Instead of the typical throttling methods which set a limit on either megabytes per second or I/Os per second, neither of which is effective in guaranteeing production I/O bandwidth impact (unless it is set to such a low limit that migration will never finish on time), the DMS employs an intelligent QoS algorithm which, in essence, “steals” the unused bandwidth from the production storage to copy the data out.

About the Author:

Wayne Lam

Wayne has over 25 years of experience in the enterprise storage industry, and has demonstrated an exceptional ability to bring new technologies to market. Wayne was a co-founder of FalconStor Software and was largely responsible for most of its successful storage products. Prior to that, Wayne was a senior executive at CA Technologies, and Cheyenne Software, prior to its acquisition by CA. Earlier in his career Wayne was the founder and CEO of Applied Programing Technologies, which was acquired by Cheyenne Software. As a college student at The Cooper Union, Wayne co-founded AGA Software, which was born of a class project in his Junior year. With experience in every aspect of the product life-cycle, Wayne has a proven track record of conceiving product ideas by engaging enterprise customers to determine their needs, and then quickly creating start-up companies to bring the ideas to market. With his vast technical expertise and keen business acumen, Wayne is able to communicate effectively to enterprise customers and partners how the products and technologies benefit real life enterprise storage applications. Wayne received a BE in Electrical Engineering from The Cooper Union in 1987.