Throughout the last decade, Cirrus Data has answered the call of a number of Fortune 100 companies when their aging or failing storage has started to give them problems. Cirrus Migrate On-Premises (CMO, formerly DMS) has the distinct advantage of being deployable without requiring changes to storage or clients, and it can be surgically inserted in the SAN and the data migrated even as applications continue functioning at full capacity. But just as often, we’re brought in when a company decides to move to a new storage vendor and needs to get their data migrated before a deadline where an increase in maintenance fees kicks in. That was the case with this major U.S. automotive manufacturer.

Cirrus Data offered the only solution for this member of the “big three” when the company wanted to move 2PB of data off their IBM A9000 arrays and onto a new Pure Storage Purity ActiveCluster environment. The manufacturer had a mix of AIX clients – some LPAR SAN boot, some standalone application servers, and a number of PowerHA clients. With CMO’s patented pMotion technology which transparently redirects client writes to newly attached block storage, Cirrus Data had the only solution capable of disconnecting (unmasking) and powering down the company’s A9000 arrays while LPARs/applications were still operational, allowing for a future cutover when the timing was more convenient for storage administrators and application owners.

With such a complex SAN environment, there was bound to be an issue or two uncovered during the course of the migration. In one instance, when CMO was in the pMotion cutover status, an LPAR was rebooted and would not start up without being masked back to the original source storage. Cirrus Data support was called to investigate determined that a certain SCSI command necessary for SAN booting an LPAR was not being passed on to the new Pure storage environment through pMotion. A patch was made and tested by the Cirrus Data engineering team and the issue was resolved quickly.

In the end, the entire 2PB of data was migrated within three months of a ten month storage refresh window prior to the maintenance fee deadline. According to the migration coordinator, “Cirrus Data CMO and CDS Professional Services were spectacular and on-point throughout the migration project whenever we requested and accomplished all the goals we set in a very difficult environment with very aggressive migration and cutover windows.”