A luxury hospitality firm operating more than two dozen hotels across North America was upgrading its aging Dell EMC (now Dell Technologies) XtremIO legacy storage to a new Dell EMC PowerFlex sofware-defined infrastructure. Moving the contents quickly, reliably, and efficiently from the old platform to the new was the primary objective facing the company selected to perform the actual migration. One of Cirrus Data’s channel partners had won the professional services contract for the project and had used Cirrus Migrate On-Premises (formerly DMS) successfully for a number of prior migrations. Even with the end-user making the switch from a legacy storage server networking model to a hyperconverged model, the partner had complete faith that CMO would be the perfect tool to accomplish the project goals. The partner cited time, money, and data integrity as the reasons for choosing Cirrus Data’s solution.

One of the first snags Cirrus Data’s channel partner encountered was due to storage hardware logistics – the wrong equipment had been sent from the vendor to the end-user’s data center, which delayed the start of the project. In the meantime, Cirrus Data’s Professional Services team provided Subject Matter Experts to assist the partner in installing, configuring, and – after the new storage hardware arrived – integrating with the new PowerFlex environment. The partner representative noted “Cirrus support was timely and excellent as always,” and called out CMO’s plugins for PowerFlex, which makes migration easy by automatically creating destination volumes on the new storage and then automatically pairing them with the source destination. “The PowerFlex plug-in and tight integration was key to us choosing Cirrus Migrate On-Premises for this migration.”

During the actual migration, neither the end-user nor the partner experienced any challenges. Even with delays encountered from a necessary hardware re-ship, the project finished on-time. The customer project manager noted, “Appliance performance was excellent. CMO made it simple to migrate from the legacy Fiber Channel based XtremIO environment to our new IP-based, iSCSI PowerFlex hyperconverged environment. Very happy with the CMO product and migration.”

In the two years since this project was completed, Cirrus Data has adapted its patented TDI technology into a Migration-as-a-Service product (no appliances necessary), named Cirrus Migrate Cloud (CMC). CMC is a block-storage array agnostic migration service that uses a web-based portal to link hosts and source storage with new destination storage in the same data center or in the cloud. Plug-ins for popular storage types are available when using CMC, just as they are with CMO, allowing the same easy integration and auto-allocation mentioned in this success story.

Whether using CMO or CMC, companies migrating their data from legacy storage to hyperconverged solutions – on-premises or in the cloud – have saved time, money, and resources using Cirrus Data’s solutions. The customer project manager in this story said it best – “fast and easy, with no impact to our environment.”