After several years of acquisitions, a global healthcare company’s data center had grown unwieldy. Concerns about application performance, data center sprawl, broken disaster recovery strategies, and lost productivity forced this healthcare behemoth to take action. After an extensive review of its environment, the decision was made to move from a Dell EMC and NetApp environment to a more cohesive HPE 3PAR architecture.

The state of the existing storage environment was not conducive to data migration, as three separate SAN islands would have to be collapsed into a single dual-fabric SAN, a process that would require also replacing a number of old Brocade switches during the migration. Considering the extremely complicated environment, the data migration solution also had to be flexible enough to migrate disparate storage arrays onto a single array with very little downtime. Additionally, with sensitive consumer healthcare information being involved, a focus on security was unquestionable.

Cirrus Data Solutions (CDS) worked with multiple partners on this project; Sayers and HPE managed the deployment of the 3PAR and new Brocade switches. As these activities were being conducted, the Headwaters Group worked with the customer to plan and execute the data migration as well as ongoing configuration of the new Brocade switches and 3PAR array during the final cut-over. CDS’ DMS ensured the migration of data was secure, efficient, and without risk.

For this project, the team created a test environment onsite to practice cut-over before it occurred. All cut-over procedures were documented before the actual cut-over took place. Thanks to this rehearsal, the insertions were transparent and the migration session and cut-over occurred without a single problem. Cirrus worked in the background by coordinating with the customer through their procedures and scheduling requirements to determine downtime and outage windows, the entire migration took place without disruption to the customer.

Throughout the entire project, the Headwaters team was able to validate each step of the process was error-free, due to the reporting capabilities within DMS. Each migration report, revealed that everything migrated and verified properly, with no errors, no security breaches, and no lost data. A positive ROI was achieved, and this healthcare giant can now focus on improving lives and continuing its business growth without concerns of its storage environment impacting these initiatives.