Open Systems Data Migration Service

Global entertainment giant improves data accessibility and lowers cost

A major, global entertainment giant made the strategic decision to separate the data environments of two fast growing, smaller business groups. Doing so also meant separating their data, of course. The data consisted of precious film and video digital assets that are accessed and exploited continually over time.

Using Unix and VERITAS NetBackup they previously backed up both business group directories to the same media in the same job. Archive media storage—approximately 1,500 DTF tapes—is at Iron Mountain.

The solution involved not only migrating the data quickly and reliably using a proprietary migration process but doing so outside of their space-constrained data center. In the process, PeakData was able to demonstrate that an upgrade to the latest, high capacity LTO-3 (not part of the original project scope, which called for LTO-2) would improve data accessibility and lower cost in the long run.

By cutting the number of Iron Mountain tapes by more than 50 percent their monthly Iron Mountain storage fees will decrease a like amount. And by refreshing their tape technology another notch up in technology as they perform the needed migration, they avoid having to do another migration in the not-too-distant future simply to stay on the tape technology curve.

Globally, companies are implementing new storage and data solutions in order to help them derive more value from their available data, reduce costs, simplify storage management, and enhance business resilience. Doing so often requires complex data migrations.

PeakData’s Open Systems Data Migration Service provides either online or offline migration of data from existing disk storage arrays or tapes to new disk and/or tape storage platforms in IBM AIX®, HP-UX, Sun Microsystems Solaris or Microsoft® Windows® environments. Options for migrating data include:

Host-based
Appliance-based
Software-based
Array-based

Each option can be used to perform local migrations (within a single site) or remote migrations ((between two or more sites, using remote connections via existing network capabilities or by performing the migration locally and then shipping the newly migrated storage platform to the remote site(s)). The approach and methodology used to perform the migration will depend on the client’s unique requirements. Key benefits include:

On-site service delivery with no impact to production operations; or, off-site at one of PeakData’s secure facilities
Data migrations can be performed for both mainframe and open systems data
Data migrations can be performed for:

Disk-to-disk
Tape-to-tape/virtual tape
Disk-to-tape/virtual tape
Tape/virtual tape-to-disk

Service delivery methodology based on best practices gained from years of experience in successfully migrating petabytes of data maximizes application availability and performance, resource productivity, and alignment with business goals
Six-sigma processes and experienced consultants mitigate risks associated with local and remote heterogeneous data migrations