Migrating Petabytes of Data to EMC Isilon with Minimal Disruption at the Cutover

for a Fortune 50 Financial Institution

Business Need

  • Migrating to EMC Isilon as a secondary platform within NAS storage estate.
  • Transitioning to Isilon with minimal disruption at the cutover.
  • Avoidance of contention during replication.
  • Copying security and permissions across platforms without errors.

Challenges Faced

  • Data replication in the background while transitioning to the EMC Isilon as the secondary NAS solution.
  • Managing the amount of network bandwidth needed for migration.
  • Driving the consistency in deploying the solution across all global data centers.

Solution Offered

The customer selected, and was supported by the EMC Isilon team, to use StorageX for their migration because it delivered:

  • Single pane view across both CIFS and NFS migrations.
  • Ability to set QoS during replication to minimize client impact.
  • Ability to manage bandwidth utilization as part of the data copying phase.
  • Minimal disruption to business for cutover.
  • Standardization across global data centers.

Business Impact

Quality of Service

  • Hot” and cold windows for replication with specific bandwidth management criteria.
  • Data replication for the initial and incremental replication policy runs while migrating all data.

Reduced Outage Window

  • Ensuring data availability for millions of internal and external users.
  • Reduced downtime for the final cutover to a fraction of what other solution offers.

Consistency and Single Pane View

    • Centralizing the management of the migration to key geographies
    • Driving consistency by leveraging the structure regardless of geo-location or protocol.