How Modern Data Centers Can Leverage Object Migration Software

For today’s data centers to operate at peak capability while managing costs, they must have the freedom to move data quickly and safely between onsite, remote, and cloud environments, says Steve Leeper from the office of the CTO at Datadobi. 

Modern data centers, which must frequently migrate between various network-attached storage (NAS) or object storage platforms, need software to help them manage scale and complexity while ensuring data security.

This has become even more important today than in the recent past, when a typical NAS migration was less complex, usually taking place between homogeneous systems and only in the tens of terabytes. It also generally didn’t center on business-critical data or even the need to distribute this data among disparate storage systems for analytics and other purposes. 

Now, NAS migration often involves the increased complexity of heterogeneous systems, diverse storage protocol implementations, and even petabytes of data. NAS data is also now more likely to be vital for company or regulated customer data, financial data, or research information. Losing such sensitive data, jeopardizing its security, or disrupting the data storage systems housing it can lead to severe consequences. 

Among them are an interruption in operations and business continuity, legal or regulatory non-compliance risk, and long-term damage to a company’s reputation, as well as other expenses and potential business losses. Additionally, it does not make sense to use outdated migration technology that does not allow a new storage platform to go into production use as quickly as possible. From a financial perspective, no one wants to see a storage platform depreciating and consuming warranty coverage when it is not yet even in production. Modern software is required to avoid these situations.

In addition to NAS systems, newer object-based storage systems have begun to appear in data centers as a component of private cloud initiatives. It is likewise known that each object storage deployment — whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid deployment — can have its own way of implementing protocols, which further increases the complexity of storage platform migrations.

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Why Are Companies Reluctant to Use Modern Migration Tools?

Despite these realities, many organizations still rely on slow, cumbersome, and outdated migration tools that are unable to manage complexity, lack proper support, and fail to integrate effective data integrity checks. Speed, scalability, automation, and ease of use are of no value unless the data being copied is being verified every step of the way. With migrations commonly involving hundreds of millions and billions of files, it is paramount to verify that all copies of data are accurate. The processes that verify the accuracy of the data must be integrated into the core copy processes and not executed in a post-process fashion. 

When faced with executing a large, complex migration, it is critical to use a modern solution that can overcome these shortcomings and offer users the ability to dramatically improve the management of NAS and object storage transitions. With an innovative software-driven migration approach, companies can introduce new storage technology faster, avoid business disruption, and fully safeguard their data. 

With this knowledge in hand, today’s data center professionals should seek NAS and object migration software that utilizes innovative and proven technology to circumvent speed, scale, and complexity limitations. For instance, this type of advanced data migration software can combine the multiple processes that NAS and object migrations require and instead create one intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to track, manage and report on it all. 

This simplifies the management of migration projects, both for migrations taking place in the same data center or in another part of the globe. Besides, such advanced data migration software can also validate and track all files in a chain of custody to provide assurance and proof of safe data migration. 

And, such solutions can handle the complexity of migrations that take place between disparate storage platforms, regardless of target or source. Data center professionals should speak with their trusted storage vendor or channel partner, who would likely be delighted to point them to solutions that they can evaluate to expedite their transition while meeting their business and budgetary requirements.

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Choosing the Right Migration Solution

An enterprise should ask questions related to a proposed migration solution. For example, does the proposed solution:

• Provide API integration with the source and target for discovery and configuration setting activities?
• Provide automation via graphically defined policy-based migration activities?
• Provide simple monitoring of migration status?
• Handle scale – not only high capacity (PBs) but high file/object counts (billions, tens-of-billions)?
• Handle various dimensions of complexity – deep directory structures, special file types, nuances between disparate vendor platforms, etc.?
• Guarantee accuracy – is every file/object verified to ensure no silent data corruption has occurred?
• Provide throttling capabilities to manage workload or network bandwidth consumption?
• Provide cutover capabilities to efficiently manage the all-important cutover events?
• Provide the ability to transfer SMB share and NFS export definitions?
• Handle multiple migration projects simultaneously?
• Provide chain-of-custody information proving the accuracy of the migration?

The bottom line is taking a legacy approach to NAS and object platform migration is complex, risky, and simply insufficient for the needs of today’s modern data centers. Faced with this knowledge, many companies simply scrap the idea of transitioning to new technology and, in doing so, toss their ability to take advantage of new capabilities and associated benefits. 

An innovative and proven data migration solution that not only streamlines the entire process but also accelerates it while removing risk makes transitioning to new storage far simpler than it has ever been. While easy to overlook, selecting a modern purpose-built migration solution can bolster an organization’s ability to make and execute intelligent business decisions that cut costs, drive revenue, and dramatically improve the bottom line. 

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