Success Stories

Success Stories

Large Food & Beverage Company

One of North America’s largest food and beverage companies was embarking on a storage refresh project at two data centers serving a combination of over 600 ESX, Linux, and Windows hosts in a Brocade environment. The two sites had accumulated over 2PB of data and a storage refresh required a seamless migration with no downtime and continued client access to high-performance databases.

One of North America’s largest food and beverage companies was embarking on a storage refresh project at two data centers serving a combination of over 600 ESX, Linux, and Windows hosts in a Brocade environment. The two sites had accumulated over 2PB of data and a storage refresh required a seamless migration with no downtime and continued client access to high-performance databases.

Customer Type

Customer Type

Large Food & Beverage Company

Large Food & Beverage Company

Customer Sector

Customer Sector

Manufacturing

Manufacturing

Source Storage

Source Storage

HPE 3Par 8440 & 20840

HPE 3Par 8440 & 20840

Target Storage

Target Storage

Pure //X70 & //X50 FlashArray

Pure //X70 & //X50 FlashArray

Number of Hosts & Clusters

Number of Hosts & Clusters

Windows Clusters, Linux, ESX VMs

Windows Clusters, Linux, ESX VMs

Host Types

Host Types

MS SQL Database

MS SQL Database

Host Applications

Host Applications

Varied

Varied

Replication Type

Replication Type

Local

Local

Number of CMO and model

Number of CMO and model

2x CMO Appliances

2x CMO Appliances

Insertion Method

Insertion Method

Path Insertion

Path Insertion

Challenges

• A non-disruptive deployment for block migration

• Limited insertion and migration windows

• Databases require minimum impact on production performance

• Combination of ESX VMs, Linux Hosts, Windows Clusters

Solution

• Cirrus Migrate On-Premises (CMO) appliances inserted with no downtime

• CMO’s iQoS used to reduce or eliminate any impact to production environment

• pMotion allowed use of new storage without need to schedule immediate cutover

Results

• Cirrus Migrate On-Premises migration was performed as data was actively being used

• CMO flexibility allowed storage partner to reconfigure migration type on the fly, pleasing customer

• Storage partner gave the CMO solution and Cirrus Data high marks

The Story

One of North America’s largest food and beverage companies was embarking on a storage refresh project at two data centers serving a combination of over 600 ESX, Linux, and Windows hosts in a Brocade environment. The two sites had accumulated over 2PB of data and were moving from two 3PAR arrays at each site to two new Pure FlashArray units at each.

Because the company had allocated most of its upgrade budget to the storage itself, it was looking to the storage partner to make good on the migration part of the project. Heavy use of SQL clusters meant that they were extremely sensitive to any downtime, and when they discovered that Cirrus could migrate their databases without any downtime using our patented pMotion – enabling the new storage to stand-in for the old storage indefinitely even prior to final cutover, they scrambled to include that as part of the solution, even though the plans up to that point had called for local-only migration and the cabling had been configured for that type of migration.

Cirrus Migrate appliances were placed into the FC fabric using Cirrus Data’s patented TDI technology, which allows SAN insertion without any downtime and without making any changes to any host, the FC switch zones, or the production storage. With Cirrus Data’s unique pMotion technology, the migration administrators were able to offer a truly zero downtime data migration solution since pMotion enabled the new storage to stand-in for the old storage indefinitely allowing the client to remove the old storage – before final cutover.

The DMS Intelligent QoS feature (iQoS) allowed the maximum use of all available bandwidth for copying data without impacting production I/O quality, automatically throttling migration when the LUN was too busy. The entire process was transparent to the database applications and caused no impact to production. At cut-over, the database owner simply unmounted the database from the old storage and remounted on the new device in a few short minutes.

Upon project completion, the storage executive in charge of the migration noted, “The Cirrus appliances worked really well for this project and I would recommend [Cirrus Migrate On-Premises appliances] all day for anyone wanting to migrate to Pure Storage non-disruptively.”