Your Data Migration Wish is Our Command

I just got around to reading our press release on the announcement of DMS version 4. While it contained the essential details of the latest version of our data migration product, it did not do justice to the monumental effort and ineffable ingenuity our Engineering team put into this release to perfect DMS to an art form. Of course, there is an irony here – because of the ingenuity involved, the effort to develop it became substantially less, even though it was still gargantuan (soon I will run out of words that mean big).

At CDS our mantra is “Work Smart.” Given the complexity of modern software, if products are not crafted from the very beginning using strict architectural discipline, rigorous design, and precise implementation, the product is pretty much doomed, although people may not be initially aware of this eventual fate. DMS is a very sophisticated system that was created using all these principles, and then was (and is) backed up by exhaustive testing.

Here’s a glimpse of how this enterprise unfolds inside the company.

First, we build software for our users. Therefore, the primary focus is on how our customers tend to, like to, and wish to use our products. Our customers include many system integrators and system administrators. With regard to these customers, our attitude is simple – “your wish is our command.” This is not an empty slogan. We all need to remember the purpose of a company, which is to make a profit! To make a profit, we need to sell products. We can only sell products that customers need and want to use. Any technologies, clever design, and ingenious features are all implemented to satisfy user requirements. This is where our extensive experience being imbued in the enterprise storage industry is a boon. In addition, our professional services engineers are constantly interacting with customers performing actual migrations for the past so many years, which have provided invaluable input toward the goal of continually improving our software.

Inevitably, we receive “wish list” items from customers, as well as from our own Professional Services engineers and our Sales staff. Some of these wishes are from those already using the product, while some are from those who would like to purchase the product, but who have special needs due to their particular SAN hardware environment.

Some of these wishes are non-trivial, to put it mildly.

The most obvious example of this would be our new “pMotion.” This feature was the subject of my previous post “Breaking the Data Migration Shackle,” where I described many of the technical challenges that needed to be overcome in order to create a true zero-downtime cutover for migration solution. As I described in that article, Cirrus Data did overcome these hurdles, and have since created a beta version.

Creating a beta version is only the beginning, though. The primary difference between using DMS with the pMotion feature versus using it without is that the DMS appliances will potentially stay in the customer environment for a long time when using pMotion. Although we have always performed intensive stress and longevity testing with DMS, the fact that the appliances might be in the data stream for this long meant we had to redouble our stress and longevity testing effort.

Our original vision for the DMS product was that it would be used on a per-migration project basis, where the appliance is inserted into the SAN environment, the data is migrated, and then the appliance is removed when final cut-over to new storage occurs. This is traditionally a short-term operation. However, from our experience over the past few years, many users inserted our appliances, then took their time to migrate the data – sometimes waiting months to do so. Even after the data was migrated, customers then also took their time when cutting over to new storage. In many cases our appliances were left inserted in critical systems for over a year. We can proudly claim a lot of mileage in our systems on large and complex SAN configuration and critical environments. Here, credit goes to our QA team. I was constantly amazed by the tenacity, thoroughness, and inventive ideas employed to flush out the most obscure bugs.

As for other new features in DMS v4, the Auto-Allocation and Auto-Provisioning have been overwhelmingly well-received. Once users try these features, they quickly become essential capabilities. In fact, once, when we encountered an issue with a storage array during Auto-Allocation, the customer’s dismay over the function’s absence was palpable. The prospect of having to create the new destination LUNs sounded incredibly daunting, making us wonder how, up until this month, all migration tools in the world required manual creation of all these LUNs? Fortunately our Professional Services team quickly identified the cause of the issue, and configured the storage to allow our Auto-Allocation to proceed. CDS is the only company can provide this ability, and it’s not by accident. It’s due once again to our patented Transparent Intercept technology, which allows us to automatically discover the storage configuration, thus providing the necessary information to further automate the process of allocation and provisioning.

But obtaining information pertaining to the storage configuration is one thing. Supporting all the disparate storage systems in the market is quite another. This is where architectural discipline comes in. The module bridging these different storage types must be thoughtfully and carefully well-designed, so that organization of the interface functions allow plugins to be created so any reasonable storage can be integrated in a short amount of time.

In fact, the newest plugin added to our supported storage list is for the EMC XtremIO® family, and it was completed in just a couple hours … over a WebEx session! I could not be more proud of our rarified team of versatile, resourceful, and brilliant engineers.

There is much more in DMS version 4, but even a blog is not the place to provide an in depth description. With this release I believe we have pretty much answered most items in our wish list.

With such a great team, my job becomes easy, such that my responsibilities are reduced to writing blogs to describe these magnificent products after they are released, as well as to applaud the team’s incredible achievements!