As we move into the year end quarter, IT folks are reviewing their storage investments to determine what leases are expiring and what has been capitalized and needs to be refreshed. As they review their situation it occurs to them that the replacement of storage will be a much more difficult task than it was the last time around. Three or four years ago, a storage frame had less than 10 TB and now storage frames contain 20 to 50 to 100TB with many more application users sharing that storage across a SAN.

 A common estimate for the replacement of a storage frame is 3 to 4 months, due to the difficulty in coordinating maintenance windows and black out periods with all the application owners for the time to move the data, reconfigure the SAN, and re-master the data to its new storage frame. During this time both the old and the new storage frames are taking up power, cooling and storage space, and leases, licenses and maintenance fees may have to be extended.

This doesn’t have to be the case with today’s technology. Several weeks ago, I visited a customer who had just installed a USP V on Friday for an online banking application. He installed it in front of an older storage frame that he was replacing and by presenting the LUNs in the older frame through the higher performance cache of the USP V, he was able to migrate 75 volumes in 45 min. He cut over into production on Monday morning and by his estimates, performance was three times faster.

Another customer, who is using older generation modular arrays in Hong Kong, has ran out of room in their current data center and needs to move to a new data center 5 km away. At the same time they plan to upgrade to current generation modular arrays.  The online nature of the application and the volume of data are such that dumping and restoring tapes or software migration over IP would not be feasible in any reasonable timeframe.  There also is no room to install any equipment for migration in the old data center. In their case they are looking to install our USP V in the new data center and connect over FC to the old arrays and the servers in the old data center and to the new modular arrays in the new data center. This enables the application servers to continue processing the data through the USP V mount point while the data is migrated over to the new modular arrays. Once this migration is complete, they plan to use the same USP V to migrate another data center to a new location on the Kowloon side of the harbor. At this time they are just using the USP V as a “swing migration tool” but hopefully as they get familiar with the performance and other features of the USP V they will implement it as a high availability tier for their production environment. The recent announcement of the USP VM, gives them the option of using a diskless version of the USP V in a 19 inch rack format which may be more suited to their midrange environment.  .

Migration of storage to new data centers is a growing requirement as our data centers begin to show their age.  At the beginning of the new millennium, we saw a major consolidation occur in the data center. As SANS provided the connectivity to install larger storage frames, and processors began to shrink in size, we saw the requirement for data center floor space shrink dramatically and power and cooling was not a concern. Today, many data centers can not support the environmental demands of server and storage growth and new data centers will have to be built, often in distant locations that will be dictated by available power, capital, and affordable labor. Some estimate that 65% of enterprise customer will be building out new data centers over the next 5 years. So the migration of data will be compounded by the need to migrate it over long distances.  Virtualization, which will enable the ability to replicate data between heterogeneous storage frames without disruption to the application, will be a key requirement for this movement to new data centers.. 

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