Moving to the Cloud – Part Two

Jul 7, 2015

After reading through our previous blog installment, you’ve decided to move some of your infrastructure to a private or public cloud. You need live migration since your production environment is running 24/7. You don’t want to install any software on clients – maybe because you’re running legacy clients with obscure operating systems or because your clients are already running at their performance limits. You also want little to no impact on your existing storage, and you don’t want any downtime until you have to cut over to new storage.

That sounds like a tall order already, but let’s add one more qualification. Not only would you like to migrate your data and adhere to all the requirements above, but you’d also like to perform your P2V in one shot as you migrate.

No problem.

Here’s the pitch, straight out, quickly – and then we’ll get on to the details.

Cirrus Data Solutions is proud to announce the cloud version of its DMS – a proven data migration solution which has been used by major storage players (IBM, Fujitsu, etc.) in the enterprise space to successfully move petabytes of data with zero downtime until cutover. DMS is the industry’s first disk-block level data migrator, designed from the ground up for migrating one LUN to another.

DMS now works with any cloud, any host OS, any hypervisor, any application, any storage, any location – from or to legacy FC SAN, virtual environment, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and IBM SoftLayer.

That’s it. Nice and simple. Migrate any data from anything to anything else, anywhere.

Installation using the DMS wizards is easy, and typically our partners go onsite and take 10-15 minutes to insert DMS into the environment and define the migration policy. After that, migration is monitored remotely until it has completed and the application and storage admins are ready for cutover. For virtual environments, a DMS-9000 VM is deployed on the server to gain access to the datastores.

While waiting for migration to complete, the cloud players’ conversion software can move any necessary application servers to cloud VMs. As long as there are no configuration changes, the cloud app servers just wait while DMS migrates the original source storage to the cloud or virtual storage in real time, while the original app servers are online and still writing data. Periodic delta resync ensures that any changes made to the source storage during migration are passed on to the destination storage.

Once migration is complete, all that’s left to do is shut off the legacy application servers, sync the last bits of data that have come in, then “flip the switch” and start up the cloud app servers in place of the legacy servers. You’re now operating in the cloud with current data, and you’ve migrated and gone P2V in one shot. Chances are, you’re also now on an up-to-date OS as well, which might not have been the case before you moved to the cloud.

By providing one simple migration tool in form factors for all host platforms, Cirrus Data has removed for our partners any and all obstacles for business growth. Since there are no changes to SAN, hosts or environment, you don’t have to send fibre channel or switch zoning experts on your deployments. All you need is a very good technician following clear instructions using our step-by-step wizards.

Since we’re celebrating our recent Microsoft Azure certification, we are offering a free test DMS-9000msaz for the Azure cloud, along with a DMS-9000vm for your ESX environment so you can set up a test migration for yourself and see how easy DMS is to install and use. Combined with the $250 promotional credit Microsoft is offering right now, this is a great way to become acquainted with the benefits of DMS at zero cost to you.

If you like what you see and decide to purchase DMS to perform some actual migration and you’ve used up all your $250 credit, we will credit any fees that Microsoft specifically charges for our product use toward a DMS solution purchase (this credit does not apply to any Microsoft server or storage charges, only to the Cirrus Data/DMS portion of your Microsoft bill).

Although we’re focusing strongly on our Azure partnership right now, remember we also have VM’s available for AWS, Google Cloud and IBM SoftLayer.

Visit our DMS for Microsoft Azure page and we’ll send you instructions and a download link for our DMS Azure VM so you can start testing DMS data migration today.

Image courtesy of graur codrin at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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.