Highlights
~500 TB of user and departmental data migrated to cloud
~250 TB of application data migrated to cloud
Impact
70% reduction in storage costs
40% reduction in workforce required to maintain storage infrastructure
70% increase in speed to copy data to cloud
Issue
An in flight cloud migration project was underway for one of banking sector client where storage migration to cloud was initially not accounted for during the analysis phase. As a gap in initial assessment and scoping, it was later discovered that the storage workloads cannot be left on-premises due to latency issues and had to be migrated to cloud. Transpire team of experts led designing the decision tree, target cloud storage, tooling and the methodology to migrate the data to cloud in coordination with the migration teams involved.
Solution
Netapp CVO was chosen as the migration target and disaster recovery solution was designed to meet the needs of the application and user data. Komprise tool was used to migrate the data to the cloud for efficient copying and cutover to the cloud.
Key Considerations and Lessons Learnt
Below were the key considerations for migration process:
A solid cutover methodology had to be designed and synchronized with lift and shift server migrations to cloud.
DFS namespace and CNAMEs had to be re-created or re-pointed to cloud sources.
Support teams involvement was key to success and Active Directory team, IAM team, storage teams and Unix teams were involved.
Choosing the right storage solution in cloud was essential to meet the performance requirements, streamline billing, support disaster recovery scenario and support both NFS and SMB protocols.
Choosing the correct tool was key and based on experience, tools such as ROBOCOPY and RSYNC were not ideal since they copy files in serial order. An efficient third party tool was utilized to efficiently copying the data and performing cutovers. Following were the key considerations:
- Having a tool which copies the data in parallel order significantly reduces the time required to copy files over the network.
- Having a tool which can copy the permission tree over to cloud is also very important since this can take a significantly long duration to do so.
- Having a roll back procedure in place built into the tool is also key to success.
- Having a tool which can provide an audit log for the data migrated to cloud is very important to ensure data consistency.
Business Continuity and Disaster recovery solution was designed where the storage was replicated at a block level to DR site.
Even if you are using Express route with a gigabit of bandwidth, it will not help since the latency to the cloud storage prevents the bandwidth to be used efficiently and transfer the data over quickly.
Speed of the file transfer over a high latency network to cloud would depend upon different factors including the number of files and the size of the data. Often even if some TBs of data is being transmitted over such network with millions of small files, it becomes a problem and the transfer and delta synchronizations cannot happen in time for cutover.
