German Cancer Research Center Deploys DobiMigrate for NAS Migration

The Customer

The German Cancer Research Center’s (DKFZ) mission is to perform cancer research. It is the largest biomedical research institute in Germany and a member of the Helmholtz Association of National Research Centers. DKFZ has more than 2,700 employees in over 90 divisions and research groups. More than 1,200 employees are scientists, and they are investigating the mechanisms of cancer, identifying cancer risk factors, and trying to find strategies to prevent people from getting cancer. The IT staff at DKFZ is limited, yet they have a very important and critical role to ensure that data and files are always available.

The Challenge

DKFZ stored over 60 million files from over 3,000 users on an aging Dell EMC Celerra NS-480. The Celerra was at the end of its maintenance life, and the IT team made a decision to invest in a Dell EMC Isilon system. The Isilon would allow for more than double the storage capacity and it was a more cost-effective solution for DKFZ and their anticipated future needs.

The IT team at DKFZ needed to find a migration solution to move all of the files to their new technology platform. The team already had the Isilon on its data center floor, and it wanted to migrate as quickly as possible to enjoy the return on investment (ROI) benefits of their new platform. DKFZ also had limited resources to dedicate to the migration, so they needed to find a solution that would be quick, easy, and affordable.

The Solution

DKFZ turned to its trusted technology partner Dell EMC to provide a solution that would accurately and rapidly migrate the data from the end-of-maintenance life Dell EMC Celerra to the new Isilon.

Dell EMC endorsed the powerful functionality of DobiMigrate for this initiative. Since the team at DKFZ has migration experts on staff and they saw that DobiMigrate’s user interface is very simple, they were able to quickly initiate and complete all steps of the migration themselves. This helped maintain costs, and they were able to complete all of the migration tasks quickly.

Metrics for Success

DKFZ was not on a strict timeline, but the quicker that their environment was consolidated and the files were migrated meant the sooner they would be able to enjoy the ROI benefits.

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