Migrating data off of a Content Addressable Storage (CAS) system such as Dell EMC Centera and Dell EMC ECS can be a challenging. Your organization has spent years writing data to ECS and has written hundreds of millions of files or perhaps billions of files and now you want to copy I to a new storage system as fast as possible. This puts more stress on the system than it has ever endured and keeping it running is critical to a successful migration. Good news you have been assigned to create a project plan to migrate the data to another storage system with a timeline. This is a career impacting project as its success doesn’t mean a promotion but failure may result in getting your name added to the next reduction in force. So, if your team does not have the skills or time then consider a ECS Migration Assessment from the DataTrust Solutions Professional Services team.

The assessment can be divided into four key areas:

1. Hardware Technical Assessment
2. Application Specific Requirements
3. Governance Requirements
4. Project Plan Considerations

Hardware Technical Assessment

The Health Reports needs to be reviewed and all technical issues need to be resolved before starting the migration. A node in regeneration state will slow down a migration up to 90%. Access node count impacts the migration speed along with average size which can be calculated from pool statistics from the Health Report. After reviewing the Health Report go to the console and note if Deduplication, Compression, Encryption or Containerization were used on any pools. Each of these actions has to be undone and impacts migration performance. Ideally some sample data can be migrated and performance measured and then used in the migration performance calculation.

Application Specific Requirements

Did the application write meta data to the Content Descriptor File (CDF) that is required to be moved with the data? Is a parser required to extract the meta data? If the new storage system uses S3 storage can the migration application write the meta data into the object header with the new meta tags? When the data is moved to another storage system how is the application going to access it? Access on Centera is via a c-clip ID and other than Dell EMC ECS no other storage system supports the Centera API. Is a mapping table, showing the Cc-clip id and new path or object id, required for the application to be updated on the new location. Has the application team built a cut-over test plan?

Governance Requirements

Review each Application and associated Centera pool to determine if the data subject to compliance or governance requirements such as retention? If any are then plan to review the migration process with your legal team so they can look for any gaps. The migration plan should detail how much retention was left on each object. Many systems can only enforce retention for the data of ingest thus any remaining retention balance cannot be passed. The difference in enforcement capabilities needs and the policies on how this will be handled defined and documented. The same is true for any data on legal hold. Legal hold processes are unique to each storage system and there is no systematic was to transfer it as a part of a migration. First, identify all data that is on legal hold. Second. understand how the new system implements legal hold. Then meet with your legal team so they can determine how they want to handle the data and reporting. 

Project Plan

Once collecting data from the above areas there are a few more questions to be answered before diving into milestones and timelines. Some of the key items are:

• Which is the priority order for migration the pools/applications?
• Will you be running the migrations in a serial manner or multiple in parallel?
• Any blackout dates for a project, like end of quarter or end of year?
• Does the cut-over have to be done during off hours? How long will the cut-over take?
• How much time is required for chain-of-custody verification once the pool data is copied?
• What Reporting requirements are needed in addition to the chain-of-custody report?
• How much lead time is required for Change Order Requests?

Great, now you have a bunch of data and it is time to put the project plan together.

At DataTrust Solutions our Professional Services Organization has successfully completed thousands of data migrations. We understand the challenges with collecting the data and putting together a project plan and this is why we provided critical information that you need to be successful. We are able to help your team with the entire project or just a part. And if you are got this, then we wish you good luck.

Contact us at [email protected]