Why Choose DobiMigrate Over Legacy Tools for Your NetApp Migration

Before making a major purchase, whether it’s business or personal, we consider what problem we’re trying to solve, we do our research, and we compare products. Why? Because we want to know if the products are worth the cost. The same process should be undertaken before beginning a data migration project: Always understand your project’s specific requirements, then carefully research, evaluate, and compare your options. This allows you to make the best decision for your specific data migration project.

For example, some legacy “freemium” tools provide network-attached storage (NAS) migrations to NetApp^® quickly and within budget. But there’s always a cost: Often what you save in dollars you may lose in performance, speed, accuracy, and data integrity. While some projects are able to use these “freemium” tools, many are suited for proven enterprise-class software products like DobiMigrate^®.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at three major factors you should consider when choosing a solution to enable your migration to NetApp: overall speed, integrity of the data, and automation capabilities.

Speed and Efficiency

DobiMigrate is an extremely efficient, performance-driven migration software capable of migrating millions to billions of files in a single cutover window, thanks to its ability to scale up and out on demand. While legacy tools are limited by a single scanning thread and only up to 16 theoretical copying threads, DobiMigrate has 64 scanning and 64 copying threads by default. What’s more, these can be increased or decreased quickly and easily “on the fly,” without the need to restart jobs.

What does this mean in regard to speed? We conducted a speed test between four tools migrating data to NetApp measuring scan performance and copy performance of small files (see Figure 1). DobiMigrate boasts better performance in most categories with a single copy engine for the sake of comparison. However, our default install is two copy engines, and many of our environments deploy four (significantly increasing performance in the process).

This table highlights scan and copy performances between DobiMigrate and a handful of offerings within the industry: Robocopy, Rsync, and XCP. Real-life results may vary depending on environmental variables.

You might be thinking, “OK, but how does speed impact my project?” Enormously. Migration speed has a direct impact on project efficiency, manpower, and ultimately, return on investment (ROI).

Is it more cost effective to run your project in 6 months or 6 weeks? The faster you can copy data, the less time you spend managing migration jobs. And, the faster you can scan data, the more data you can fit into a cutover window and the fewer cutover windows you require (a great savings as cutover windows are the single most resource intensive portion of a migration project). Time spent copying directly impacts the effectiveness of your migration, while time spent scanning directly impacts the project’s level of effort. Fast means less project cost.

Integrity of Data

While speed is clearly an important factor, you should also consider the integrity of the data that is being migrated. DobiMigrate brings more than speed and efficiency to NetApp migration projects; it also concentrates on maintaining the integrity of your data.

To ensure the highest level of data integrity, DobiMigrate not only performs metadata and file content validation on every file it touches, it also produces a chain-of-custody report that can be kept for safekeeping in the event of an audit. This allows our customers to adhere to strict data protection directives and maintain compliance with industry regulations.

DobiMigrate’s data integrity features make it the ideal choice for highly regulated environments such as healthcare, finance and banking, energy, oil and gas, and government. While legacy migration tools are often offered at a lower price point (or even free) and claim the ability to migrate to high-end services like NetApp, legacy tools don’t afford the same level of validation, reporting, or functionality offered by DobiMigrate.

Automated Discovery, Migration, and Reporting with DobiMigrate

For a DobiMigrate data migration to NetApp to be fast and efficient – and maintain the integrity of the data – process automation is critical. DobiMigrate automates everything from discovery and assessment, to job creation and remediation, to cutover and post-migration reporting. The automation capabilities of DobiMigrate allow for more complex migrations including one to many, many to one, thousands of paths, billions of files, or highly regulated data.

Legacy tools don’t offer this level of automation in their software, meaning processes must be executed manually, which can be labor intensive and time consuming. DobiMigrate’s automated capabilities exponentially reduce the level of manual effort needed for NFS/SMB migration across native and third-party storage solutions. DobiMigrate connects to and manages the source and destination storage devices, requiring little knowledge of the software or human interaction for operation. These effective and unique automation integrations not only lower the risk of error but also decrease the level of expertise needed to perform and monitor these tasks.

When to Choose DobiMigrate for Your NetApp Migration

If you have less than 50 TB of data, 10–20 millions of files, one source and destination – AND customer satisfaction and/or compliance isn’t a concern – legacy tools may do the trick. However, if you need to conduct your migration with high performance and high customer satisfaction, then you should consider a proven enterprise-class software product, like DobiMigrate.

If you want minimal disruption to your organization during the migration, then software that automates the migration will be your best bet. If you need to stay compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, CCPA, and GDPR, then you need a migration software product that prioritizes maintaining data integrity and provides a way to easily and clearly access chain-of-custody reports. And if you need all of these enhanced capabilities, finding a refined software solution that offers them all could greatly benefit your project: That solution is DobiMigrate.

How to Purchase DobiMigrate

DobiMigrate can be purchased as software only or delivered as a service. For more information, please visit the DobiMigrate product page.

All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them. NetApp is the registered trademark of NetApp, Inc.