Formed in 1985, Logan Aluminum is located in Logan County, Kentucky and is jointly owned by ARCO Aluminum Inc. and Noveli Corporation. The company is a world-class manufacturer of Aluminum sheet products with special expertise in fabrication of rigid container sheet, building products, automotive sheet,
distributor sheet, and food can sheet.

Background

For Logan Aluminum, the shutdown of a single mill due to server downtime costs the company hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. To avoid shutdown during a planned migration, the Service Team had planned to work nights and weekends over a 6-week period. The team was excited to learn that another solution, the Vicom Systems DME, could do it in a single weekend. InfoSystems, an IBM Business Partner and a long-time Logan Aluminum supplier, introduced the Vicom solution and then guaranteed the migration. After giving the go-ahead, Bob Mounts, Logan Aluminum's Technology Leader, said, "We knew enough about the Vicom solution that we felt comfortable and since InfoSystems was willing to stand by the result, the decision was easy.”

Objective

Move 1.3 terabytes of data from the StorageTek V960 and from the IBM FastT 200 to the IBM ESS 800. Migration requirements included: compatibility with Windows NTFS file system, LUN Expansion capabilities, seamless transport of file permissions and shares, as well as fast migration speeds.

In prior migrations, Logan Aluminum had to wait 8 hours or more to copy 180 gigabytes of data. With Vicom, the same task took a little more than 2.5 hours. Bob Mounts, explained, "Our past experience with host-based migration software like Robocopy, Scopy, and Rcopy has shown that they are too slow. By using the Vicom’s DME, we migrated everything in a little over 24 hours, including security permissions, and our shares remained intact. In the past, we always seemed to have an issue with permissions and shares, especially with host-based migrations."

Permission and shares reside on the disk and not within the file data. Since host-based migration methods copy only the files, the permissions can change. This change occurs because the NTFS volume receiving the file treats it as new, and all newly created files inherit the permissions of their parent folder. Moreover, problems with missing permissions and shares are often so subtle that Storage Administrators usually have no idea that a user is denied access until complaints are received. To fix these user access issues, Logan Administrators previously had to verify the security request and determine what type of access the user has and is allowed. In addition, Admins were required to scrutinize the entire security archive to ensure that the user has not been blocked from accessing other files and directories. Time spent verifying and rectifying user access ranged from 15- 45 minutes per user.