The life cycle of an organization's data will most likely out live the infrastructure that hosts it. In the current regulatory environment, the types of data subject to complianceare increasing rapidly and the retention duration is extending. As a consequence, managing "regulated" fixed content is a growing problem and it is taking a bigger byte out of IT budgets.

Refreshing storage systems and transitioning data from the legacy storage system to a new one is becoming increasingly complex due to compliance and governance requirements. Not only does the data, meta-data, permissions, ACLS and retention information have to be physically moved, but it must be done in a manner that allows the organization to prove the data was not changed or tampered with during the transition. Shadow FS provides an exact mirror of files on a new target, verification of every migrated file and chain-of-custody reports, but this is not what makes the software so special.

Shadow FS enables migration of files in a transparent and compliant manner without any resynchronization between the legacy and new storage systems - this happens dynamically. It avoids the classical problem of slow file system trolling to get started or lenghty cut-overs to close out projects.

Transitioning retention from one system to another should not be an event, rather the software should automatically adjust and update the new system. File system migrations in compliant environments will become routine and the process needs to be efficient and effective rather than a dreaded IT assignment. This is why DTS developed Shadow FS.

Many EMC Centera systems are approaching the end of their service life and now the task of transitioning the content to a new archive must be planned. If the application wrote data to Centera via DiskXtender or CUA, the UNC path is already defined and the task of transitioning to a non-object storage system is relatively straight forward.

If the originating application used the Centera API to write to Centera then the migration process is a bit more complex. The key steps are:

• Extracting the content from Centera
• Unpacking Blobs and containers
• Parsing application meta-data
• Meeting application requirements for derived or synthetic paths
• Updating the application with UNC paths versus object ids
• Chain-of-custody reports

DTS has extensive application expertise and supports leading email, content management and call recording applications.

Contact our Professional Services team to learn more about our Centera migration methdology, file verification process and how we can take the hassles out of a Centera migration.