Migrating data off of a Dell EMC Centera Content Addressable Storage (CAS) system can be a challenging experience. Your organization has spent years writing data to Centera and has written hundreds of millions of files or perhaps billions of files and now you have to migrate the data to another storage system as fast as possible.

At DataTrust Solutions our Professional Services Organization has successfully completed hundreds of Centera data migrations over the past 15 years.  We can migrate data off EMC Centera independent of the ingest methodology as we support: Centera API, CUA, Tivoli Storage Manager, DiskXtender, or Rainfinity/CTA.

Many applications use the EMC Centera API and write custom meta data to the Content Descriptor File (CDF). The problem is that Centera is a proprietary black box that has a steep learning curve. Hence most customers elect to work with third parties that have made significant investment in custom software solutions to migrate the data and meta data.

DataTrust Solutions understands the technical issues surrounding the complexity of EMC Centera, its API and meta data structures. Our EMC Centera migration service is deigned to minimize impact to your TI staff and delivers:

End-to-End Service

Our Centera migration software was internally developed specifically for EMC Centera. We Support writing to EMC ECS, any S3 target supporting AWS S3, NAS, SAN Azure. We have developed parsers to extract application specific meta data and processes to write to the new targets. If you have a bespoken application, we can write a parser for that too so custom meta data can be passed to the new storage system. We can also provide mapping tables so applications can be updated. Our Project management can cover the entire project or you can handle it. Our Centera migration software can be delivered as an ISO so it will run on any hypervisor or we can install in on a physical server. We deliver our services remotely via VPN or can use other remote applications.

Transparent

Data Integrity

Centera uses a custom MD5 hash to internally verify the integrity of each file. The MD5 hash is a content-based hash that changes if anything is added or removed from the contents of a file. After every file is copied to the new target the migration server reads back the file and calculates the MD5 hash and compares it to the Centera MD5 to verify the file contents are 100% identical. If the hashes do not match the file is remigrated and then reverified.

Data Governance

File verification is part of the chain-of-custody report, which details the source c-clip, source MD5, the target MD5, target path and textual statement of whether the copy was successful in CSV file.

If a file in Centera was in Compliance mode (WORM) we can write the file to a target and pass this on to systems that use Snaplock, Smartlock, or Object Lock.  For file in Governance mode we can capture any retention information and can pass it on to another storage system in the format it requires. Note that some storage systems can only enforce retention form data of ingest. In these cases, we will work with you and your legal team and implement the desired approach.  

Fast scalable performance

Our EMC Centera migration software is multi-threaded for maximum performance. We have fine grain control so we can dynamically scale up or down the migration performance.  Generally, our software running on a single VM node can read faster than Centera can supply data. However, if you have 16 or Centera more access nodes additional migration VMs/nodes can be used and run in parallel.

Experience

DTS professional Service Engineers have on average 20+ years IT experience and extensive knowledge of EMC Centera. We have been successfully migrating data off EMC Centera systems for over 15 years.

Supported Targets

Migration targets include:

• EMC ECS
• Public Clouds: AWS S3, Azure
• S3 Object Storage
• Rest API Object Storage
• NAS

To learn more about our Centera / ECS migration services contact us at [email protected].