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In this latest blog article, I wanted to cover a topic that is not looked at as the most glamorous or technical, but nonetheless can mean the difference between a successful or failed migration. What is that topic? Proper testing protocols in data migration.

While this might seem like a subject posed by Captain Obvious himself, it is something we see pop up often enough to warrant a deeper discussion.

Amid the explosion of unstructured data, many companies are hurrying to migrate and protect their organization’s data and applications in the cloud. They do so in the hopes of taking advantage of its flexibility, powerful performance and computing capabilities, scalability, storage capacity, and faster application deployment.

Most of the resources that are being deployed in IT today are aimed at generating, storing, and serving data to your customers and employees. Across all industries, data is growing at unprecedented rates and although it has the potential to bring business value, it can also bring substantial cost, risk, and pain to not only you but everyone in the data chain (i.e., all your customers and staff).

From an early age, technology has had an extreme influence on the trajectory of my life. What started out as an interest in video games, such as Asteroids on Atari or Super Mario on Nintendo, has translated into a 35+ year career in the industry. My fascination continues to evolve with the field every single day.

According to IDC, there will be about 175 zettabytes (ZB) of data worldwide by 2025 compared to 64.2ZB in 2020. Not surprisingly as a result, 95% of businesses cite the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for their business. 

Datadobi achieves KPMG’s SOC2 Type 1 Attestation for DobiMigrate

Research firm IDC predicts there will be 175 zettabytes (ZB) of data worldwide by 2025 compared to 65 ZB in 2020. With the exponential growth of unstructured data over the past few years, data is being migrated at a maddening pace. 

Datadobi is proud to support both this year’s Georgia Walk for Breast Cancer and our very own Sandy Mahla. 

On October 2-3, It’s The Journey, Inc. will hold its 18th annual Georgia Walk for Breast Cancer. Participants will complete as many as 30-miles over the course of the weekend. The in-person event will have limitations as a result of COVID-19 safety measures, but there will be activities for those who attend. Specific information can be found on the event website.
Recently, someone told me, “Any amount of money for migration tools is too much compared to using freeware tools and throwing bodies at it.” Throughout the years, this is a statement I have heard time and time again regardless of migration cost.

In 451 Research’s latest Voice of the Enterprise Report: Storage, Data Management and Disaster Recovery 2021 study, it was revealed that 73% of respondents claimed their organizations were increasing their spending on data protection as a result of the potential threat of ransomware. The report also revealed that only 26% of respondents were confident that their current backup tools would facilitate a successful recovery. 

The saying, “data is the new oil,” holds a lot of merit in today’s IT landscape. With unstructured data being created at a rapid pace, it is critical that enterprises discern properly when choosing tools to manage their data.

Recently, someone told me, “Any amount of money for migration tools is too much compared to using freeware tools and throwing bodies at it.” Throughout the years, this is a statement I have heard time and time again regardless of migration cost.

Protecting your network-attached storage (NAS) data either in the data center or to the cloud requires a solution that understands the complexity of file data. Traditional backup solutions are often expensive and complex technologies that are not built to backup NAS. They generally use old approaches or hastily built solutions – and anyone who knows NAS, knows that it is anything but simple.

If you’re already familiar with Datadobi, you know that we focus on unstructured data. This presents a unique data mobility problem domain separate from SAN-based block storage datasets.

It’s a huge challenge to migrate and/or protect the hundreds of millions to billions of files and objects that are common in today’s storage environments. To that end, Datadobi is constantly investing in new technologies and methods that allow us to work with these datasets in more and more efficient ways.

For many enterprise-scale organizations, managed system integrators (SIs) have become the ‘go-to’ outsource partners for a vast variety of strategic technology requirements and niche challenges. Using this approach, a project is often transferred from the customer to the SI, and while this offers some very well-established benefits, customers can also become distanced from key processes and find they are unable to respond effectively to changing requirements.

Enterprises are typically very concerned about how long it will take to complete a data migration project. After all, prolonged migrations can cost organizations hundreds to thousands of dollars. As a result, many data migration solution providers have prioritized speed over all other factors.

Recently, I was working with a customer who wanted to test using a Security Identifier (SID) Map file in DobiMigrate. For those unfamiliar with SID mapping, DobiMigrate has the ability to replace source SIDs with new SIDs as the data is written to the destination file server, and can do the same for User IDs (UIDs) and Group Identifiers (GIDs).

In an earlier blog post, we provided details about a specialty data migration we call “CTA Bypass,” which is a unique way to speed up what is normally a very slow migration. And when I say slow, I mean periods involving months or even years to migrate the data – not exactly the speeds needed in the current world where the ability to do everything quickly, including migrating data, is of the utmost importance.