Drive innovation. Delight customers. Deepen your commitment to sustainability. All these goals are vital, but without the right storage solutions, organizations often find themselves making tough trade-offs rather than bold advancements. This is what led one of the largest electric motor manufacturers to take on an ambitious storage modernization. The end-user wanted to sunset aging Dell XtremeIO and Unity storage arrays and adopt modern Dell PowerMax All-Flash arrays inside a new data center. This migration project was designed to enhance performance and efficiency, enabling the manufacturer to deliver more innovation and superior service to its customers.

Nine months. That’s how long the end-user’s team had to migrate a complex variety of hosts, applications, and virtual machines from many vendors and legacy data centers to the new data center across the state. The end-user serves global customers, requiring the execution of this storage modernization with minimal downtime. This, paired with the complexity of the storage environment, meant a remote migration was required—but how would the IT team accomplish this while also overseeing their numerous other strategic projects?

The end-user required a data mobility partner with technology that was flexible enough to handle a multi-vendor migration and the expertise to address any issues that arose. The end-user’s trusted reseller partner recommended Cirrus Data on both counts. Cirrus Data’s solutions provided any-to-any connectivity, enabling the migration of all the end-users’ AIX, Linux, Oracle, Windows, Oracle VirtualBox, and Oracle Enterprise Linux hosts and applications without disrupting the services that the end-users’ customers depended on. Based on the reseller partner’s reference, Cirrus Data’s professional services team had the experience and expertise to perform the entire data center migration.

The Cirrus Data team deployed Cirrus Migrate Cloud and Cirrus Migrate On-Premises to seamlessly migrate all hosts and applications to new Dell PowerMax storage, with zero impact on the customer’s live systems. While planning this migration, the Cirrus Data team learned the end-users’ Oracle databases were running on a combination of SAN storage, VirtualBox, and Oracle Enterprise Linux. This meant its virtualization engine did not allow for SAN or host-based migrations without lengthy downtime. To avoid this, the Cirrus Data team facilitated a virtual machine compute-level migration from the Oracle VirtualBox environment to a more supportable hyperconverged environment on VMware, all while maintaining the consistency of the Oracle databases.

By working closely with the end-user, the Cirrus Data team completed the storage refresh and data center migration within the nine-month timeline. In addition, Cirrus Data’s any-to-any integration made it easier to automate data synchronization and rigorously test the new storage environment, expediting the cutover from the old data center to the new with minimal downtime, i.e., a reboot. Today, the end-user’s new data center has the high performance and efficient storage they require to provide strong service to their global customers.