How Your File Management Can Avoid Data Lock-Out

If your data management vendor closes, will you be locked out of your data?

Recently, a major cloud solution for secondary storage, backup, archival, and disaster recovery shut down, likely creating anxiety and uncertainty for its clients. This anxiety is probably justified: many file management solutions take ownership of your data—effectively holding you hostage to their offering.

Data lock-out—including physical gateway appliances, filesystem software virtualization, proprietary filesystem namespaces, and individual file stubbing or sharding—poses several problems for customers:

– No direct access to your files.

– Increased cost, risk, and complexity due to vendor lock-in.

– Loss of enterprise-level scalability capabilities.

At Data Dynamics, we believe that you should always maintain direct control of your data, whether you’re with us or not.

Data Dynamics’ StorageX solution offers:

– Direct Access to Your Files, Your Way (SMB, NFS, S3).

– No gateway, file virtualization, proprietary namespace, stubbing, sharding, or agents.

– Scalability to enterprise levels.

– Automated source mapping and provisioning at destination.

– File transform and file to S3 object conversion.

– A solution based on policy engines and industry standards.

To learn more about Data Dynamics and our industry leading file management platform, contact us today or email us at sales@datdyn.com.

P. Mehta, CEO

Must See! Powerful StorageX 8.0 File Analysis Video Demonstration

Petabyte Scale Migration – A Personal Story

Are you facing a large petabyte scale migration?

Here’s how one Fortune 100 company used StorageX to successfully manage a ten-petabyte migration, in 20% the time compared to traditional tools.

Client Requirements:

Eliminate origin storage issues
Address unstructured data growth
Scale to accommodate 100s of cutovers weekly
Move both CIFS & NFS in a mixed environment
Maintain security
Attain buy-in from business units

Project Details

CIFS and Mixed Mode shares
4,000-5,000 total shares
Up to 40 TB per share
Up to 180 million files per share

Results

10 years’ of work done in 2 years (2PBs in first four months).
10 PBs optimized total
50% cost savings realized

How StorageX Completed the Project Successfully and Under-Budget

Phased migration: Using GUI interface, it was easy for the customer to configure migration policies (baseline, incremental, and final copy). This reduced the downtime window required to migrate the NAS data.

Security permissions and file attributes: StorageX copied security permissions (in Windows) and mode bits and file attributes (in Unix). No manual intervention or correction was needed.

Migration summary: Detailed summary report of the migration, with migration start-time, end-time stamps, bytes copied, number files and folders copied, skipped or deleted files, and error logs.

Customer Story

Data growth, equipment end-of-life (EOL), and increasing support costs are leading organizations to consolidate and eliminate older and more expensive storage systems. Using traditional “free” tools, the cost of these data migration is significant and can present substantial business and technical challenges.

The Drawbacks of Typical Approaches

A variety of tools are typically required to move data between arrays from different vendors or to newer equipment, and traditional migration solutions do little to simplify the process.

Host-based tools can consume CPU cycles and I/O bandwidth, reducing the performance of other business applications. Array-based solutions either do not support heterogeneous storage environments, or offer a one-way transfer that locks customers into a single-vendor solution. Appliance-based solutions require a service technician to enter the data center, install the appliance in the data path between the host and the storage device, and then remove the appliance after performing the migration. The result is expensive, intrusive, not readily scalable, and requires downtime before and after the migration. To efficiently meet ongoing migration needs, storage administrators needed a simpler, less disruptive, and more cost-effective way to migrate data between heterogeneous storage arrays.

Why StorageX File Management?

StorageX is a software-based solution which facilitates file-based storage management. Its simple, yet powerful GUI based tool simplifies the migration, consolidation, and archiving of file data in large, complex, heterogeneous file storage environments. StorageX is fully automated and uses policy-driven approach to data management.

StorageX supports various NAS devices (EMC VNX/VNX OE for File and Isilon/OneFS, NetApp/Data ONTAP 7-Mode and Cluster Mode, Windows, and Linux) as both sources and destinations, as well as stand-alone CIFS and NFS file storage resources. StorageX software can be installed on virtual or physical servers. Installation is a simple and straightforward process. We migrated more than 3,000 NAS between variety of source and destinations storage systems/servers. Some of the major benefits of StorageX are explained below.

Benefits of StorageX:

GUI interface:
The graphical user interface makes it very easy to handle bulk NAS migrations. With the GUI, we can add storage resources (source and destination) and create data movement policies for NFS/CIFS share by specifying the replication and migration options.
Migration Policies:
Migration policies define the data movement between source and destinations. For CIFS shared folders and NFS exports, there are several configuration options available. Carefully input the data in the migration template as it is the base for deciding the migration options. Options are available to copy directories only, delete orphaned file/folder on destination, copy security settings, choose file attributes, filter files by age, exclude files/folders, etc. After the initial baseline data copy phase, continuous incremental copies ensure replication of new, locked, or recently modified files on the source to the destination.In the final cut-over phase, StorageX options allow you to remove user access to the source, perform a short, final sync to copy any new files recently added or updated, and then share the new destination with users.This phased migration (baseline, incremental and final copy) approach reduces the overall downtime window required to migrate the NAS data.
Migration Schedule:
Once the baseline copy is completed, subsequent incremental copies can be automated through migration schedules. Migrations can be scheduled every minute, hourly, daily, weekly, etc.
Automated Emails:
Email notifications can be configured for effective monitoring. We did not need to login to the tool to check the migration status, emails alerted us under different conditions (completed successfully, completed with errors/warnings or cancelled).
Migration Summary Report:
Summary reports give a detailed status of the migration with migration start, end time stamps, bytes copied, number files and folder copied. If the migration is cancelled with error or if it is unsuccessful, the error logs clearly indicate the cause so we can troubleshoot to fix the issue and retry the data copy. If certain files are skipped or deleted, that is also indicated in the summary.
Security Permissions and File Attributes:
A major challenge in NAS data migration is copying the security permission (in Windows) and mode bits and file attributes (in Unix). StorageX is able to copy security permissions and file attributes over smoothly from source to destination based on the options specified in the migration template. No manual intervention or correction is needed after the final data copy.

Have you been putting off the need to update or replace thousands of aging NAS volumes containing millions of old files?

If so, you need StorageX.

StorageX is the ONLY file management solution proven capable of managing massive petabyte migrations. It is not wonder that six of twelve world’s largest banks rely on StorageX.

StorageX 8.0 New Release Introduction

Watch this six minute video to learn about StorageX 8.0, the latest release of the industry leading file management solution. Learn about the new file to object conversion feature and more.

The Future of NAS is Object

If you’ve been around the computer industry long enough, you’ve witnessed major shifts in technology.

One such shift took place in 1992, when NetApp, Inc. was founded. NetApp pioneered a new enterprise storage technology called Network Attached Storage (NAS). Compared to traditional direct attached storage (DAS) and storage area network (SAN) storage, NAS storage offered access to large amounts of storage in an easy to manage appliance. NAS was enabled by improved network technology and new high capacity disk drives. NetApp combined the new technology in such a way to revolutionize the enterprise storage market.

In the 25 years since its introduction, NAS remains a highly viable enterprise storage solution, but some might say it’s beginning to show its age….

Continue reading the new white paper.

A Custodial Shift of Data Management to Meet the Needs of a Digital Economy

Organizations must adapt to meet the requirements of the new digital economy where data is the most prized asset. Unfortunately, the management of the underlying storage for this most valuable of assets remains with centralized IT, who look at data from an infrastructure perspective, as a cost to manage, rather than the asset it has become. I predict that in 2018 the management of data storage will shift from centralized IT to individual business units. This transition will lead to a more focused approach around each application’s and user’s need for data and their ability to access it when and where they want it.

The reason 2018 will be that transformative year of change is because:

We are in an API driven world and the maturity of API’s allows for applications to write to and leverage storage management software to automate the creation and management of their data.

Storage technologies are starting to meet the scale required for the vast amounts of digital content that is created. Object Storage provides the scalability, redundancy and security required to meet the vast deluge of data.
The cost of storing data is dropping as the price of raw disks, both flash and SATA, continue to drop substantially year over year.
The public cloud providers have proven that creating nimble infrastructure is feasible at scale. Application users are experienced in selecting criteria upon which to purchase and manage their storage.

The digital economy is creating a new asset category where the mining of each 1 and 0 is The Competitive Difference. 2018 will see the shift of the custodian of these 1s and 0s from traditional centralized IT to the rightful owners of the data, the business units.