storage migration advice between different storage

[apple]

dear storage gurus,
appreciate you can shed some lights on storage migration.
if i want to migrate data in one storage from different principal to hp san storage, what does it take?
currently the storage is presented to windows server.
may be you can share your experience on storage migration or any best practise or advice.
many thanks in advance. thanks a lot

[Peter Mattei]

Well, storage migration is a wide field!
There are many ways of doing it depending on things like:
Storage type, connectivity, OS, storage software used, availability needs ....

If you can afford some downtime the easiest is connecting the new storage in parallel, shutdown the applications, copy data from old to new, remap your drives and restart.
On Windows you can use Robocopy which has some nice features.

If you cannot afford downtime it is getting tricky!
If you have Storage software like Symantec Volume manager installed you can setup a software RAID1 over old and new storage and after everything is synchronized unconfigure the old storage.
There are appliamces you can introduce in the data path that will redirect IO to the new storage (but this usually takes some downtime to intrduce)

So, first you need to define if you can afford some downtime.
Then you need to know
- what storage software is installed.
- how is your old and new storage connected (SAN, SCSI, SAS ...)
- will your LUN setup and sizes be equal before and after the migration

On size does not fit all

Cheers
Pete

[IBaltay]

Hi,
if you e.g. have 2 XP storages and the 3rd party storage is capable to be an external storage (EMC Clariion CX 600, SUN Storedge 6120/6320, IBM, etc.), then you can use the HPXP CA migration between the 2 XPs (one with external storage) for Windows.

[apple]

great. erm, if i want to migrate ibm storage to hp storage, what is the time effective way to migrate the data from these storage?
thanks a lot

[IBaltay]

Hi,
As Pete said, it all depends on the storages types/models, because the tools and functions differ. If you can use the external storage feature and the Continuous access feature, then the time span is dependant on the mirror method (synchronous or assynchronous with acknowledgment), and the capacity to be migrated.

[Peter Mattei]

You have to be much more specific! Like:
- What is your source and target array?
- What OSes are involved?
- Do you have Veritas/Symatec volume manager or something similar?
- Whar SAN switches do you have and do you have free ports?
- Are we talking about stand-alone arrays or replicated ones?
... ?

Cheers
Pete

[PP BIJU KRISHNAN]

>>great. erm, if i want to migrate ibm storage to hp storage, what is the time effective way to migrate the data from these storage?
thanks a lot
>>

I would say you go for host based migration tools.

There are 3rd party software available for online migration of data from one drive to another.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/itanium2/pdf/symantec_vsf_win.pdf

Check the above PDF.....!

Although every storage vendor promises interoperable replication software, when it comes to implementations, the reality of different standards in the Storage world comes to effect.

My advice for a TIME EFFECTIVE WAY is to use host based tools.

[apple]

- What is your source and target array?
ibm to hp storage
- What OSes are involved?
windows to windows
- Do you have Veritas/Symatec volume manager or something similar?
- Whar SAN switches do you have and do you have free ports?
there are some ports available
- Are we talking about stand-alone arrays or replicated ones?
stand alone

[Juanjo Arruza]

There is a new question for the migration.
What type of data is? (database data, Exchange data, Documents, video, etc)
For Windows to windows storage migration the best tool is Robocopy.
We have used it for migrating data from EMC to HP storage.