GLOBAL FINANCIAL ADVISORY AND CONSULTING FIRM
Discover how our products have helped those in the financial sector
CHALLENGES
SOLUTION
RESULTS
• Extremely limited access to data center site and storage arrays
• Minimum impact on production I/O
• Data must be moved within a two-month timeline
• Limited bandwidth available for migration traffic
• Cirrus Migrate Cloud does not require physical access to data center
• CMC’s Intelligent Quality of Service (iQoS) can increase / decrease migration throughput on-the-fly based on production load
• CMC allows migration and cut-over to new storage to be conducted with zero downtime when used with Microsoft SQL Cluster tools
• 50TB of data was migrated from old storage to new with zero downtime
• Entire project was completed within a two-month deadline
• Users and application owners noticed no impact to production during migration or cutover
• Customer and Partner gave Cirrus Support team and Cirrus Migrate Cloud high marks for the project, calling both “spectacular”
THE STORY
A global financial advisory and consulting firm specializing in Chapter 11 reorganizations came to one of Cirrus Data’s channel partners with an urgent data migration issue. The company had just contracted for a storage refresh from its Dell Technologies VNX5200 to a new Pure Storage FlashArray//X50 unit that was used to host data for its Windows SQL cluster, but the data center that the company used had very tight site access restrictions. In addition, there was very limited bandwidth available for migration of the 50TB of block data that needed to be moved.
The partner had used Cirrus Data in the past and was familiar with the capabilities and flexibility of our Cirrus Migrate On-Premises solution, but the limitations of the data center in this case eliminated any possibility of deploying appliances for migration purposes. Also, the preparation, migration, and cutover all had to be accomplished within a two month window.
Cirrus Data proposed using its new Cirrus Migrate Cloud for this migration, since it was based on the same patented TDI technology as our traditional physical appliance offering, and required no downtime for migration. In fact, no physical access was even needed for the actual migration, since Cirrus Migrate Cloud is a block-migration-as-a-service solution that only required installation of a thin service on the Windows clients. Once this client service is installed on the hosts with data to be migrated, a direct connection is set up in the background between the two storage arrays and the data is moved with such efficiency that often the application owners aren’t even aware that migration is active. Cirrus Data’s Intelligent Quality of Service (iQoS) monitors the migration throughput and throttles back the migration throughput in a surgical manner as the client data load becomes more intense, and then throttles it back up as the source volume host activity decreases. Throughout the company’s data migration process, there was no observed impact to business practices relying on the clustered Windows SQL environment.
After the migration had completed, Cirrus Migrate Cloud even facilitated a zero-downtime cutover in the customer’s clustered environment using cMotion – a Cirrus Data feature which transparently re-routes host data writes from old storage to new – using the Windows SQL Failover Cluster
Manager. All 50TB of data was migrated to the new Pure Storage array and the hosts were cut over to the new storage successfully before the two month deadline passed.
The customer noted that “the Cirrus Data CMC product, as well as their PS and Support, were spectacular and on-point throughout the migration project,” and also added that “we accomplished all our goals for this project in a very difficult environment due to a restricted site and very limited network bandwidth.”
