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.

EMC DiskXtender is the most common gateway used to write content into EMC Centera CAS. DiskXtender provides users and applications with the familiar NTFS volumes on the front-end and archives to Centera via its native API on the back-end. This simplicity resulted in wide adoption.

Unfortunately, the bottomless volumes presented by DiskXtender were achived by stubbing the Windows Server file system. Thus to migrate content from Centera to a new archive the file system has to be rehydrated and this is a time consuming task. Luckily DiskXtender wrote the file path information into the Centera meta-data for each file. By capturing this meta-data files can be migrated off from Centera at high speed without needing to use DiskXtender. The files can be written to a NAS target in the exact structure as they exist on DX for painless transition to new storage.

Migration Software for Centera (MSC) has been used for years by DataTrust Solutions and Partners to migrated content from Centera to NAS, Cloud and Object Systems. MSC has become the Swiss Army Knife of migration software with lots of content management specific meta-data parsing and application updating built into to it.

MSC-DX is a slimmed down version of MSC with only the elements needed to migrate content written to Centera from EMC DiskXtender. The entire process has been reduced to two three steps: 1) Configuration 2) Run 3) Reports. MSC-DX is delivered as a VM, so no application configuration is required.