Medical Equipment Company
Challenges
• Due to a limited budget, the client wished to use their own resources to perform migration
• The organization was also dealing with a data center relocation, where hosts would be powered off and physically moved to a new location
• With the source storage in a multi-tenant environment, data from other nonmigration hosts could not be exposed
• No downtime window was available before the location move occurred
• A small SAN team worked remotely from overseas and had limited bandwidth to work on destination storage
Solution
• CDS was directly engaged to train the customer’s IT staff on data migration using CMO
• CMO was used to intercept four storage ports not being used
• Production paths were moved to the intercepted storage ports for hosts to be migrated
• The customer used the auto-allocation feature to create and match new LUNs to source LUNs
• CDS provided eight hours of free remote training and labs, eight hours paid onsite configuration and insertion, and 16 hours of remote service as subject matter experts
Results
• No production impact was felt during the CMO insertion and no production outage occurred throughout the migration phases leading to site relocation
• The project began as a small POC, and turned into a moderate amount of migration on the initial PO, after which additional capacity was purchased to migrate all remaining US-based data
• The customer completed the migration on time, below budget, and used only three out of eight days of the budgeted PS service
• The customer had such a great experience with CMO in the US that they decided to use CMO for an overseas data migration project
The Story
A medical equipment company located in the United States but with a contracted IT services team in India, inquired of Cirrus Data Solutions if they could keep costs down by using their own team to perform a local storage refresh using Cirrus Migrate On-Premises (CMO). Managing a data migration from a remote location can be complicated, especially when the remote team does not have complete LUN requirement information for all hosts.
With the limited bandwidth from the US to the company’s facility overseas, manually configuring all LUNs for the 26 client hosts would have been incredibly time-consuming, and the chance for human error would have increased. Adding to the complexity of the project, the data center was also being relocated and hosts would need to be powered off and physically moved to a new location. Additionally, there was no downtime window available before this physical move occurred. This client needed a solution that would allow migration to happen without a downtime window, that was easy to use, and that also possessed the technology to automate some of these manual processes associated with data migration.
Since the data center was located in the US, and the IT services company in India, the client chose CMO to solve their data migration challenges. Cirrus Data technicians went onsite at the data center to install the CMO appliances, and then trained the IT services staff remotely for eight hours, which included four hours of hands-on labs. The remote IT services team utilized the auto-allocation function of CMO which created the new destination LUNs and matched them to the client hosts. Onsite service was completed at the hosting location without any face-to-face interaction with the customer. The simplicity and flexibility of CMO allowed the customer and its IT staff to perform all data migration functions on their own, remotely, once the appliances were installed.
In the end, the project was completed without any issues, on time, and under budget. Only three of the budgeted eight days of PS service were used. There was zero impact to production during the CMO appliance insertion and during the migration phases leading to site relocation.
