When a major telecommunications firm with production sites located in CSC shared data centers in Connecticut and Delaware was purchased by a major dot-com, the dot-com decided to consolidate the storage to a Google Colocation facility in Virginia.

The CSC data centers required any migration appliance to pass a colocation security scan and to operate in lock-down mode. Additionally, since the data center was a multi-tenant environment, there were restrictions on attaching anything to shared storage arrays. Adding to the complexity of the migration, no downtime would be tolerated until cut-over.

Cirrus Data’s Cirrus Migrate On-Premises (CMO), with its patented TDI technology and ease of use, made it the perfect choice for this migration. CMO’s flexibility allowed the appliance to be inserted on the hostside, where no changes to the storage environment and no downtime would be necessary. Since the data centers were hosted in three different states, CMO demonstrated the ability to migrate a large amount of data using only TCP/IP connections with compression and encryption. Utilizing CMO’s auto-allocation feature, the entire SAN was mapped (even with host-side insertion), allowing client LUNs to be identified for migration and new LUNs to be automatically created on the destination storage and matched with existing host LUNs, alleviating the need for hours of manual and error-prone processes.

The entire migration operation was managed remotely by a team of IT professionals and once again proved that CMO is the least intrusive way to migrate and consolidate storage among different storage subsystems in multiple locations. The purchasing dot-com was able to successfully access all application servers and data from its data center in a timely manner and was extremely pleased with CMO’s friendly usability and I/O efficiency.