The cloud is a productivity enhancing destination for enterprise data centers. That being said, getting there can be problematic. Heterogeneous environments present some significant complexity, time, and cost challenges to data migration. These challenges can result in undesirable outcomes for managers in charge of a business’ bottom line.
Fortunately, this has given rise to new technologies designed to simplify and accelerate the migration process. Utilizing multi-protocol connectivity, dedicated data migration solutions make it possible for data and applications to be transferred easily and effectively between iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and FCoE environments.
Challenges
Translation – If the enterprise has its data stored on an iSCSI SAN, but the cloud environment is Fibre Channel, corresponding cloud infrastructure and protocol translations are needed in order to execute the migration.
Performance (Temporal efficiency) – Carrying out the data migration within a reasonable period of time is essential. IT administrators are pressed to provide utility (remaining online while migration occurs), while ensuring a minimal occurrence of application stops and restarts.
Solutions
Enterprise data centers are complex by their very nature, necessitating administrators’ reliance on single solution utilities in the performance of local or remote data migration across SAN, WAN, or LAN network fabrics. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has become essential to this process. IaaS provides the ability to execute remote applications deployment, remote site moves, and remote infrastructure changes. With IaaS, application migration includes database services or Exchange Servers as part of the data center virtual machine, server, and storage framework.
Data Migration Solutions (DMS) are appliances that solve the problem of carrying out multi-protocol translation and migration of the Fibre Channel-based (2Gb, 4Gb, or 8Gb), or iSCSI-based (1Gb or 10Gb) data that that is supporting cloud applications. Without such utilities, users are forced to employ multiple-component solutions to these migration problems, increasing time and cost.
With regard to DMS choices, the chosen utility should be able to easily carry out data migration between heterogeneous Fibre Channel- and iSCSI-connected storage arrays from all storage infrastructures.
Specific criteria should include:
- Solution should have flexible data migration capabilities for Fibre Channel and iSCSI-connected storage in local, remote storage configurations.
- DMS should be able to function as the exclusive data migration utility.
- Storage arrays should be identified and a determination made as to the DMS’ ability to handle them (i.e., HP, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu, etc,).
- Simultaneous Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) connectivity should be supported.
- DMS should support SANs from all relevant vendors, and be easily and painlessly upgradeable.
- With regard to multiple location data centers in the cloud, the DMS should provide minimal interruption during migration.
- The DMS utility should provide support for thick-to-thin provisioning across varied array types.
- Migration coordination should be conducted through a wizard-driven GUI tool or CLI scripting.
- DMS should provide a user-friendly controls for configuring and executing data migration.
- The DMS should support multiple job-scheduling options and load-balancing to accommodate older, lower-speed arrays.
Although cloud data migration has become a primary concern for enterprise data centers, new heterogeneous technologies such as DMS can remove many burdens for IT managers. DMS solutions allow IT managers to perform the job of management, rather than data migration specialists.