Sustainable Shift: Cirrus Data Solutions Streamlines Major Data Migration for Energy Giant

From Cirrus Data Solutions (CDS)The path to more sustainable energy solutions is paved by better technology.

But while sustainable energy can make us think of solar panels and wind turbines, adopting more efficient data storage can be just as important. Modern storage solutions like Pure Storage, Inc. can not only reduce business costs and improve performance, but also enable power companies to better achieve their sustainability goals.

This mindset led a Fortune 500 energy company to plan a major data migration to a new Pure Storage system that would better serve its more than 6 million retail customers across 24 states. The energy giant needed to move 2.5PB of crucial block data from a leased data center in North Carolina to a facility it owned in Texas – all within a strict 9-month timeline to avoid contract penalties. If successful, this data migration promised to both boost the company’s storage performance and deliver cost benefits. Here’s how the company worked with CDS to tackle this cross-state migration with near-zero downtime.

Problem: How to expedite 2.5PB data migration without downtime
Energy delivery and consumption is a 24/7 business. This means there is never a good time to take applications and databases offline, even if it’s for a much-needed data center transition. So, in addition to the tight 9-month timeline to move 2.5PB of crucial block data across the country, the energy giant also needed to finish the migration without disrupting operations. Another complication emerged with the energy company’s telecommunications provider, which charged a high price for its fastest data connections. This meant the full migration could not be performed remotely without excessive costs and delays.

The energy giant faced a tough situation. It needed a secure migration process that would protect critical applications and databases, be cost-effective by not requiring pricey data transfer connections between data centers, and required near-zero downtime to prevent business disruption. Because the energy company had relied on CDS for successful data migrations in the past, the company engaged CDS for this tough problem. It was not disappointed.

Solution: Cirrus Data’s ‘Lift and Shift’ migration strategy

Cirrus Migrate On-Premises

The CDS professional services team presented the energy company with a ‘lift and shift’ migration strategy. This involved shipping the new Pure system to North Carolina and using Cirrus Migrate On-Premises and its intelligent QoS over multiple high-speed locally attached network connections in the source data center to migrate the live data locally without impacting application performance or causing downtime. Next, the new fully loaded storage system was securely transported to the Texas data center and installed. Finally, the company used Cirrus Migrate Cloud to remotely migrate and update any data that had changed while the storage system was in transit. This only required a limited delta of data to be transferred remotely, so the energy giant could use an affordable 10GB/s connection.

This lift and shift approach securely migrated the necessary 2.5PB within the required timeframe and enabled a swift cutover with near-zero downtime – all while avoiding high telecommunications costs. The Cirrus Data professional services team managed the entire migration to ensure a smooth process. Even when the energy giant discovered its boot drives hadn’t been included in the original migration plan, the firm’s team adapted quickly, and transferred all boot drives and blades using Cirrus Migrate Cloud. This avoided the need to rebuild all the servers from scratch, allowing the customer to keep all the same installation, application, and configurations of their critical business applications and hosts while securing the original project timeline. Upon cutover of the applications and databases to the new data center, the migrated hosts at the new location were simply booted up and resumed activity on the migrated storage.

Result: Successful, cost-effective, and seamless data migration
The combined local and remote migration strategy with Cirrus Migrate On-Premises and Migrate Cloud made the data center transition a huge success. The energy company’s new Pure system was up and running in 7 months, 2 months ahead of the original timeline. CDS enabled a live data migration that resulted in near-zero downtime during the host reboot, preventing business disruption. The project also achieved telecommunications cost savings thanks to the lift and shift strategy.

By adopting an energy-efficient solution in Pure, the energy giant both improved its storage costs and advanced its green initiatives. CDS was pre-tested with Pure and able to integrate with any other block storage vendor. This migration story demonstrates how expert management from the CDS team alongside its data mobility solutions can perform large-scale data migrations without disruption, empowering businesses to focus on strategic growth.

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