Planning and Preparation for an Unstructured Data Migration

“By failing to plan, you are planning to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin

The growth of unstructured data continues to be a hot topic in the world. As the data we capture continues to become more and more important in how we make business decisions, the data we save continues to drive up capacities. I have read that some experts say the value of data is becoming more valuable than oil. I think I’ll have to wait and see on that one. Nonetheless, capacities in filesystems these days easily exceed hundreds of terabytes and, in many cases, multiple petabytes.

This explosion in data growth across filesystem environments has made hardware refreshes an extremely difficult process. Adding to the challenge, in many cases the datasets in these environments are not fully understood when it comes to usage and access patterns. User home directories in many enterprise environments are storing employee data that is not critical to the business. Yet for some employees, their personal data has made it through multiple tech refreshes unscathed. In addition, different regulations in some instances can result in datasets that can never be deleted! Lastly, it is not uncommon for customers to find themselves locked into their storage vendor due to the fear of cross-platform migrations.

Planning and preparation for an unstructured data migration is arguably the most important part of a migration. DobiMigrate^® software has long included a Discovery process that is key to identifying key characteristics in the filesystem environment. With hooks into the management application programming interface (API) of the industry’s top filesystem technologies, this Discovery process can be critical in planning for a successful migration.

We recently released DobiMigrate 5.9, which includes enhancements to this Discovery process. With the addition of rich Discovery and Analysis capabilities to the existing Discovery process, DobiMigrate can provide even deeper detail in discovering and analyzing all relevant paths leveraging storage management APIs. Users now have the capability to create General Planning reports that include:

• SMB Shares
• NFS Exports and Aliases
• Quota (advisory, soft, and hard)
• Used Capacity
• Replication

The Planning report, in turn, can be used to determine the strategy users will take for the migration, and then execute their network-attached storage (NAS) migrations. Let’s next take a deeper look into these capabilities.

SMB/NFS Shares and Exports

With Shares and Exports, the Discovery process generates a report showing the following data points:

• File Server
• Path
• Shared Status
• List of Shares, Exports, and Aliases
• Number of Shares and Exports
• Number of Child Shares and Exports
• Number of Parent Shares and Exports

This information, in turn, can be used to identify what paths are relevant to your environment and further develop a strategy for your migration. As an example, users can now identify multiple times exports are shared and identify multiple paths, which can be helpful in determining the use of symlinks to provide the same user experience in cross-platform migrations.

Quotas

Quota reports provide users with access to information that can be very helpful in determining which values might need to be migrated over to the new storage. In Quota reports you will find:

• File Server
• Path
• Quota Origin
• Capacity Quota
• Capacity Origin
• Used Capacity
• Approximate Item Count

Capacity

Capacity reports can be used to identify capacity in the environment at various levels. Users can derive capacity by looking at the child level for example. Capacity reports provide users with the following data points:

• File Server
• Path
• Capacity Origin
• Used Capacity
• Approximate Item Count

Replication

Replication reports can be used to identify if replication is configured on the path, if data is replicated as part of a parent directory replication, if child directories are replicated, a filtered file set is replicated, or if there is no replication at all. The following data points are captured in the report:

• File Server
• Path
• Replicate
• Replication Paths
• Replication Targets

With that said, the addition of advanced Discovery and Analysis capabilities to the DobiMigrate software is part of an exciting new direction our software suite is heading. The data captured in these reports will be very helpful for our customers to intelligently create their migration strategy, as well as help determine how they carve up that new storage in their environment. Again, failing to plan is planning to fail and what administrator in this day and age can risk the chance of a failed data migration? I am going to go out on a limb and say: Absolutely no administrators can risk a failed data migration.

For additional details on Datadobi’s rich Discovery and Analysis capabilities, please feel free to reach out and drop us a line. As always, we are eager to open discussions on how we can make your next unstructured data migration a lot less stressful and, even more important, a success!