Near or Far

High-Speed Migration Over Any Distance

Whether your business is migrating data between existing data centers or transferring information to a new data center entirely, Vicom’s appliance-based architecture is the most scalable, predictable and efficient methodology for keeping your migration on schedule and on budget regardless of the distance to be covered.

There are several cases where a business may need to migrate data between centers. A few examples are a need for consolidation, insourcing operations formerly done by a vendor or outsourcing internal operations to a vendor. Vicom’s data migration appliance (DMA) supports data migration to and from many different data centers architectures, such as:

  • Traditional architecture data centers (DC) to private cloud
  • Dedicated DC to managed service provider DC
  • Managed service provider DC to dedicated DC
  • From one DC to another DC

Benefits

Long Distance Migration Solutions

  • The Vicom migration solution offers transfer speeds that are 10X faster than host-based migration methods. Faster transfers mean project deadlines are met sooner even when migrating offline. Vicom’s service provides migration error protection, isolation and high-level data security that respects the privacy of our customers during transfers.
  • By migrating baseline data and making incremental changes before final sync, our efficient data copy reduces the amount of information that needs to be copied over distance. If your source LUN is thin LUN, Vicom’s DMA copies only the actual data instead of the entire LUN.
  • Our DMA architecture supports dark fiber as well as cost-effective IP WAN transport while allowing migration to resume even when connection loss occurs.
  • DMA also handles any source- and destination-side IT architecture, meaning our customers can migrate their data without altering their SAN setup.

How It Works

Bandwidth limitations and latency issues can impede long-distance migrations, both of which significantly increase migration costs. The pipe is often lower bandwidth than native fiber channel or it’s being shared with other applications. Both scenarios reduce bandwidth and migration speed. 

Latency is increased by around one millisecond for every hundred miles. Migration performance degradation suffers further if the destination storage is not configured to handle long-distance traffic. Installing Vicom’s DMA at the source site and the destination negates the negative effects of distance and latency, optimizing migration throughput via two key technologies — Agility Data Pump (ADP) and Sherpa.

Our DMA fills long and narrow data pipes to capacity, maximizing throughput and reducing the impact of limited bandwidth. The DMA automatically determines the latency value prior to migration and adjusts the number of migration threads to reduce data gaps.

While the DMA optimizes data to efficiently traverse the long-distance link, our Sherpa appliance off-loads and maintains the data stream to the destination storage. Sherpa efficiently buffers large blocks of data sent by the DMA from the source site, forwarding it to the destination storage through the local connection with only minor latency.

Migration between data centers – Dark Fiber between data centers
Migration between data centers – IP connection between data centers

Case Study

One of our clients — a large European airline — decided to migrate data to a managed service provider data centers that was 350 miles away.

They had to migrate 350 Terabytes of SAN data from existing AIX, HP UX, Linux, VMware, Windows and Solaris on EMC enterprise storage arrays to IBM storage arrays in another data centers. Both source and destination data centers belonged to different vendors, so strict isolation and security policies were required. This migration was performed by the customer after Vicom migration architects performed discovery, planning, setup and completed a readiness migration. The customer successfully migrated its data with Vicom support and completed the entire project on schedule and budget.

All data migration activities operated in the background, which ensured there were no service interruptions and allowed simultaneous enterprise capability in both source and destination data centers. Our automated migration planning, configuration and pre-migration testing ensured that even unexpected hurdles were no obstacle to success.

Contact us to hear more about how the Vicom solution can offload the work of your next data migration.

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