German Cancer Research Migrating to EMC/Isilon With Datadobi DobiMiner

The German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the largest biomedical research institute in Germany and a member of the Helmholtz Association of National Research Centers, has deployed DobiMiner to move over 60 million files from an aging EMC Celerra NS-480.

DKFZ has more than 2,700 employees in over 90 divisions and research groups. More than 1,200 employees are scientists, and they are investigating the mechanisms of cancer, identifying cancer risk factors, and trying to find strategies to prevent people from getting cancer. The IT staff at DKFZ is limited, yet they have a very important and critical role to ensure that data and files are always available.

DKFZ stored over 60 million files from over 3,000 users on an aging EMC Celerra NS-480. The Celerra was at the end of its maintenance life, and the IT team made a decision to invest in an EMC Isilon system. The Isilon would allow for more than double the storage capacity and it was a more cost-effective solution for DKFZ and their anticipated future needs.

The IT team at DKFZ needed to find a migration solution to move all of the files to their new technology platform. The team already had the Isilon on its data center floor, and it wanted to migrate as quickly as possible to enjoy the ROI benefits of their new platform. DKFZ also had limited resources to dedicate to the migration, so they needed to find a solution that would be quick, easy, and affordable.

DKFZ turned to EMC to provide a solution that would migrate the data from the end-of-maintenance life Celerra to the new Isilon.  EMC endorsed the functionality of DobiMiner for this initiative. Since the team at DKFZ has migration experts on staff and they saw that DobiMiner’s user interface is simple, they were able to initiate and complete all steps of the migration themselves. This helped maintain costs, and they were able to complete all of the migration tasks quickly.

“I was a completely impressed with the entire migration process. The support that the Datadobi team provided was above and beyond. We discovered an issue after the initial migration, and I needed the immediate assistance of Datadobi to migrate some files again,” said Tobias Reber, server group leader, DKFZ. “This could have been a huge disaster, but the quick attention and hands-on support from the team at Datadobi to resolve this hiccup was second to none. It is not often that you can get immediate and actual live support from a dedicated team of experts.“

Metrics for Success
DKFZ was not on a strict timeline, but the quicker that their environment was consolidated and the files were migrated meant the sooner they would be able to enjoy the ROI benefits.

Business Benefits
The team at DKFZ is enjoying their cost-effective consolidated platform. Not only do they have double the capacity of storage space with their new Isilon environment, but it is much easier to manage. As the business needs continue to grow and additional migrations are on the horizon, the team at DKFZ knows that they have a migration tool in DobiMiner.