Data Storage - Switching storage vendors

Author

Switching storage vendors

alan

2004-11-29, 7:45 am

I'm looking to speak with someone who has been through a major change
of their primary storage vendor. How did you do it? How did you move
your data? Why did you do it? Was it worth the hassle?
Thanks,
Alan

Seb

2004-11-29, 5:45 pm

== Quote from alan (alan@radding.net)'s article


> I'm looking to speak with someone who has been through a major change
> of their primary storage vendor. How did you do it? How did you move
> your data? Why did you do it? Was it worth the hassle?
> Thanks,
> Alan

Hello for one customer We moved from EMC Clariion and Xyratex disk arrays to HP
Virtual Arrays. It was worth the trouble because with the new hardware we had
better caching and we increased the available bandwidth and I/O performance.

For another customer we migrated from EMC Symmetrix to HP XP1024 (OEM HDS), once
again newer hardware and better caching..

In both cases we used the built-in volume management to migrate the data (HP LVM
and Solaris with VxVM).

The technique is quite simple :

- create mirror on second storage device
- (wait for sync to complete)
- pull cables on original storage box (this gives you a way to fall back)
- perform fsck (if UFS/HFS filesystem) and have DBA's check their tablespaces
- if OK, forcefully delete the stale mirror records from your volume manager's
database
- voila

There are also products out there that will move/convert data from one storage box
to another, without requiring a connected host. IMHO they are expensive at the
least, and I trust my unices/volume managers to do what they were designed to do -
manage volumes and storage...

Needless to say, before migrating your storage, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A GOOD BACKUP !