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The customer is a leading international bank
and financial services firm headquartered in Europe. The firm employs
nearly 70,000 employees and serves more than 13 million customers
in 76 countries worldwide.
Background
During a planned data center consolidation, the Bank researched
large-scale migration options and discovered that not all migration
tools were the same. The staff spent three months searching for
a data migration solution that would meet requirements for an online,
non-intrusive, heterogeneous data migration.
In light of the 9/11 attack in New York City, the company included
long-distance disaster recovery to its long list of requirements.
Initially, the Bank had planned to locate the consolidated data
center in lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center. After 9/11,
however, the company decided to move the data center off-site, away
from New York City. Ultimately, a site in New Jersey was chosen.
Solutions evaluated included: HP Storage Apps, Veritas Volume Replicator
(VVR), NSI Double-Take, Falconstor, and IP replication. Host-based
solutions, while a possibility, were dismissed as too error-prone.
Host-based options would require installation of software on every
host. Each installation would require
determination that the right OS was installed, the right driver
level was being used, and that all patches and updates were correct.
Once host-based migration was completed, the host software would
need to be removed from the host. Overall, the process would introduce
significant operational exposure and
downtime.
Objective
Before the migration could be performed, the Bank had to qualify
Vicom’s DME. Three steps were required for the qualification
process. In the first step, the head of storage management needed
convincing that Vicom’s product could meet the following migration
criteria:
• Perform the migration while hosts were attached and remained
in production operation
• Seamlessly migrate from DAS to SAN without host intervention
• Verify data Integrity from source location using the source
host
• Provide a fall-back option for unexpected problems from
the data migration
Once Vicom convinced the Bank that these criteria could be met,
system administrators responsible for the migration selected Vicom
from only two solutions that met the Bank’s requirements.
The project manager for the International Bank explained, "It
was very difficult to find a vendor with data migration services
that actually worked. In fact, only one vendor other than Vicom
made it to the last qualifying phase, and that vendor failed miserably
in actual application.“
Solution
The Vicom DME provided a comprehensive solution that performed heterogeneous
migrations including multiple operating systems (AIX, NT, Solaris),
storage makes (SUN, IBM, EMC, and HP) and protocols (SCSI to FC).
After completion of each migration, System Administrators validated
migrated data against original host servers located at the New York
City source site. This enabled verification before physically re-locating
the servers to New Jersey. The solution also worked with communications
infrastructure connecting the New
York and New Jersey sites. Finally and most important, the migration
was performed online without business disruption, while meeting
all stringent high availability requirements.
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