Customer Success Story: Tight Timelines are No Problem with DMS

Cirrus Data’s services partners are proving to themselves time and again that our patented data migration technology not only makes impossible project deadlines possible, but that it also surpasses expectations when it comes to performance and simplifying timelines.

In this blog, we will delve into a healthcare company’s data migration project that was managed by our service partner, Contour Data Solutions. This particular project had a tight deadline that the services partner was tasked with meeting before the existing storage reached its end-of-lease.

Many of our customers in the healthcare industry are challenged by the sheer volume of sensitive information that must be protected, stored, and shared across providers, even as it also must remain accessible at a moment’s notice. This is a daunting task for most healthcare IT departments. However, the mandate is clear: increase innovation, support a growing level of data, and reduce costs – all while conforming to HIPAA regulations.

From an initial review, meeting the organization’s requirements in the given timeline seemed nearly impossible. The requirements were:

• install the new storage architecture and migrate the data within three months

• maintain HIPAA compliance

• zero impact to operations

If the deadline was missed, a $57K/month fee would be due on the leased equipment. The company’s own IT department forecasted the process would take six to nine months to complete, with the data migration phase being conducted in the off-hours. Considering these requirements, it didn’t seem possible to meet the given deadline.

Working together with Cirrus Data’s leading services partner, Contour Data Solutions, the Pure and Cirrus Data teams determined there was a way to make the timeline and budget work while still preserving data integrity and staying within performance requirements. DMS’ patented TDI technology allowed it to be placed between the host application and the storage back-end platform while the storage was still in production, ensuring the migration was transparent to the application team, IT, operations, and most importantly to the healthcare company’s clients.

During migration, DMS’ intelligent QoS (iQoS) function monitored the data path to determine the real-time data and network requirements, and automatically paused the data migration process when the host application traffic was congested. It then resumed the migration at full speed when it was certain there would be no negative impact to production traffic. This unique capability of DMS enabled a much shorter migration timeline. In fact, DMS exceeded all expectations by completing the migration in a mere six weeks.

After performing data migration using DMS and CDS’ purpose-built technology for the first time at its customer, a representative for the services partner had this to say, “DMS is remarkable. The ease of migrating is a breath of fresh air and has saved the client countless man hours.” The partner was so impressed, Contour Data Solutions decided to use DMS for all block-level migrations moving forward. Meanwhile, the healthcare organization saved a great deal of money by completing the migration within the existing storage lease window, resulting in an extremely satisfied customer.

To learn more about this and other Cirrus Data customer engagements, check out our case studies.