Drive innovation. Delight customers. Deepen your commitment to sustainability. All these goals are vital—but without the right storage solutions, organizations often find themselves engaging in tough tradeoffs rather than bold advancement. 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 NVMe All-Flash arrays inside a new data center. This migration project promised to improve performance and efficiency, enabling more innovation and superior service for the manufacturer’s customers.

Nine months. That’s how long the End-User’s team had to migrate a complex variety of hosts, applications, and VMs from many vendors from the legacy data centers to the new data center across the state. The End-User serves global customers, needing to execute 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 pull this off while also overseeing their many other strategic projects?

The End-User needed a data mobility partner with technology flexible enough to handle a multi-vendor migration and the expertise to tackle any issues that arose. The End-User’s trusted reseller partner recommended Cirrus Data on both counts. Cirrus Data’s solutions had any-to-any connectivity to migrate all the End-User’s AIX, Linux, Oracle, Windows, Oracle Virtual Box, and Oracle Enterprise Linux hosts and applications without disrupting the service that the End-User’s 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 the hosts and applications to new Dell EMC PowerMax NVMe storage with zero impact to the customer’s live systems. While planning this migration, the Cirrus Data team learned the End-User’s Oracle databases were running on a combination of SAN storage, Virtual Box, 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 VM-Compute-level migration for the Oracle Virtual Box environment to a more supportable hyper-converged environment on VMWare — all while maintaining the Oracle databases’ consistency.

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 data center cutover 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.