European Bank Merger
Challenges
• Migrate multiple petabytes of data with zero downtime for deployment — one-time insertion only — and no existing production FC ports can be touched
• Large number of client hosts (over 500) in a large enterprise environment running diverse mix of OS’, including different versions of AIX
• Over 20,000 LUNs over four storage arrays, presented to 2300 initiators on 586 hosts
• Selected client hosts and LUNs will NOT be migrated to the new site
• Data center relocation is from one country to another
Solution
• Zero-touch storage-side CMO insertion was used on dedicated migration ports on the array to avoid touching any production ports
• Surgical zoning and LUN masking changes were used to deliver sets of LUNs for migration with zero downtime necessary for client hosts
• TCP/IP-based CMO remote replication feature with compression optimized bandwidth between countries
Results
• A unified migration solution was provided without any need to worry about the client host platform
• Multiple pairs of CMO8000’s were deployed to migrate the LUNs over several “waves” or batches
• CMO storage-side insertion on the array’s dedicated migration ports met the “no-touch” requirement, with no impact to existing paths
• Sets of LUNs were migrated using the CMO paths with out any additional need to go on-site for cabling changes
• Remarkable performance was achieved — over 500Mbytes/sec with just a single gigabit link, due to a 5:1 compression ratio
The Story
The financial group represented here had recently completed a major bank merger in Europe. Cirrus Data’s Cirrus Migrate On-Premises (CMO) was brought in to consolidate two large data centers in Vienna, Austria to a new data center in Italy. Four EMC arrays with 64 active FC ports were in active production in Austria, and since the customer had a unique “no-touch” policy in regard to the migration, a unique insertion approach was decided upon where the free storage controller ports normally used for migration purposes would be used for CMO insertion.
Under normal circumstances, no zoning or configuration changes are necessary when using CMO. However, due to the unique situation presented with this financial group and their no-touch policies, the Cirrus Data technology partner performing the migration decided that precise zoning would be implemented to allow access from the migration controller ports on the storage arrays to CMO and destination storage rather than putting CMO in-line.
The insertion and migration process was seamless, and with such a huge number of client hosts and associated LUNs being migrated, the operation was split into multiple waves, where each wave targeted a group of hosts using a particular application.
The migration team performed detailed and careful analysis of storage and switch reports generated by CMO, identified possible challenges and issues from those reports, and was able to evaluate the feasibility and provide solutions before any actual tasks were performed.
