DataCore: Migration Suite for Non-Stop Business Ops

DataCore Software Corp. announced the SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite is available for authorized and trained solution providers to deliver a range of non-disruptive migration services to meet end-user client needs.

It minimizes the time and cost associated with storage-related disruption and downtime, providing non-stop business operations to keep critical users and applications running undisturbed during maintenance, migration, system moves or whatever data storage upheaval is occurring behind-the-scenes.

"In customer meetings, I am often met with skepticism that there is no way to do an easy migration without a lot of disruption. After they see the power of DataCore storage virtualization software in action, their jaws literally drop because they cannot believe that it can be that simple to migrate their storage and VMs," said Barry Martin, partner and chief technical architect at The Mirazon Group, a DataCore solution and professional services provider.

The suite combines SANsymphony-V software licenses and access to call support center for a trained solution and services provider to implement and complete a specific customer migration project. Additionally, rather than having to purchase the SANsymphony-V software outright, migration services providers can take advantage of the migration features under a 30 day license model, enabling them to get difficult customer migration and data center relocation projects completed within more limited budgets.

The Disk Migration Suite reduces the hours, effort and downtime required to migrate disk contents and VMs between storage devices and systems. It is most often used during a hardware refresh to help replace older storage arrays with newer devices. The suite generally is configured to run on separate servers inserted between the hosts and the storage systems. After the set up, non-disruptive migrations are simple to perform.

"DataCore’s SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite turns what has been a very problematic and time consuming hardware refresh task into something quick, reliable and simple. The software passes-through access to the original disks, while copying their contents to the new storage equipment in the background," explained Augie Gonzalez, director of product marketing, DataCore. "After the new device is fully synchronized it can be reconnected directly to the hosts, leaving the older device to be used in another capacity or decommissioned."

Storage Migration for Real-World Needs
Recently, the SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite facilitated the non-disruptive move of a data center for customer Homecare Homebase.

The Mirazon Group was responsible for the migration and Brent Earls, senior systems engineer at the IT solution provider and consultancy, lauded the role the technology played during this process, noting: "We were able to move Homecare Homebase from one data center to another data center using the DataCore SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite. There were 200+ VMs that were moved with no downtime whatsoever."

According to Earls, the software provided a HA stretch site mirroring capability and other features that kept the customer’s environment up and ‘hot’ during the whole migration, even though all of the VMs that were migrated were customer-facing.

"These migration capabilities are a godsend to IT services and solution providers, as well as to IT administrators who are responsible for the uptime of their organizations and need help to complete such projects," added Earls. "The SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite delivers the right tools to keeps users and applications running undisturbed while necessary refresh maintenance, migrations or relocations are occurring behind the scenes."

The SANsymphony-V Disk Migration Suite is available from authorized partners around the world.