Storage Migration Experience at Mexican Bank
by Hu Yoshida on Aug 22, 2011
During my visit to Mexico, I met with members of a large bank who described their storage migration experience over the years that they have been an HDS customer.
In April 2004, Hitachi Data Systems won the SAN project at this bank, and we replaced two EMC Symmetrixs, one HP XP512 and one EVA. The project consisted of migrating 35 servers in two different locations in Mexico (Mexico City and Monterrey). The bank bought four 9980Vs for their mainframe environment and moved the 4 9960s they had in this environment to the OPEN Systems architecture. The migration process took the team close to six months, working most of the time between 24 to 36 hours to migrate each server on specific weekends. This was done by migrating each server, one by one, through OS tools.
Four years later, Hitachi Data Systems won the bid to refresh the open systems storage, and by that time there were 150 servers. The migration of the servers was done in two different ways. Some were migrated by using OS tools (like the previous effort), and others through virtualization on Hitachi USP-V. The task was a six month effort. The servers that were migrated using virtualization took only two months, while the remaining servers took four months.
Last year, the bank opted to use Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning (HDP) and Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager (HTSM) in the infrastructure to improve their utilization percentage, which was calculated at around 30%. In order to do this they had to migrate all volumes from “traditional” LUNS to HDP Vols. There were 300 servers between Mexico and Monterrey. They migrated all the servers in a two month period by moving at least 15 servers per weekend, and a few others during the week (depending on the importance of each server).
When they were done, they had migrated all their servers with no down time. After using Zero Page Reclaim, they had recovered an average stranded capacity of 60% between four different USP-Vs.
Virtualization makes a real difference in the migration of servers to new technology storage. The added benefits of Dynamic Provisioning increases the utilization during this migration, and the combination of virtualization and Dynamic Provisioning extends these benefits to existing assets, increasing Return On Assets.
Thanks to Enrique Eraz for working with this customer to achieve these results, and providing this documentation.
