Your Data Migration Project Deserves the Best Tools Available

 Exploring why premium migration tools are worth the investment

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.

A Premium Data Migration Tool Saves Money Over Time

Many free data migration tools have popped up in the data management market looking to entice organizations to use vendor services to move data. While at first the sticker price might be tempting, I want to extend a word of caution toward these tools.

Unfortunately, freeware or legacy tools always end up costing enterprises a lot more money in the long run. Opting for these services risks having the entire project stalled or completely halted. Below, I present three fronts that prove investing in a premium migration tool will end up saving enterprises money in the long run.

Upfront Cost of Migration Tool vs. Total Cost of Migration Project

Organizations often get stuck in the rut of the cost of the migration tool and fail to see the bigger picture.

As seen in the graphic below, there are several factors that add cost to a migration project. This doesn’t capture all the different types of project costs that contribute to the total cost of operation (TCO) of a migration project. However, it shows how simply reducing the duration of a migration project significantly affects those costs.

Reducing the duration of the project is only one of the ways that DobiMigrate provides ROI.

10x Reduction in Level of Effort and time spent

With DobiMigrate, users can expect a 10x (or more) reduction in the level of effort (LoE) of a migration project compared to legacy or freeware tools.

A recent discussion I had revealed that the particular enterprise was told that their migration would take 139 hours to perform using a freeware tool. For the same project, it would take DobiMigrate 12 hours to complete.

“Wait, how’s that possible?” they asked. Hopefully, you are asking this as well.

The “free” migration offering had included several hours for discovery, job creation, remediation, cut-over tasks, and assessing risk. On top of that, there was a two-week duration just to copy the data and make it ready for cut-over to the new hardware. The migrations also had to be split into several outage windows due the slow performance of the freeware tool.

With DobiMigrate, all these tasks are automated and come with a performance of up to 25x that of legacy and freeware tools. DobiMigrate automates discovery, job creation, reporting, remediation, and many steps in the cut-over process saving countless hours. Even more important is that DobiMigrate would copy the entire data set in a couple of days in a single cutover window.

Freeware migration tools pose risk to your project, customer data, and relationships.

Freeware tools are slow, lack automation that can save vast amounts of time and risk, and lack the ability to handle today’s enormous amounts of unstructured data. Two widely used freeware tools today were built back in 1996 when hard drives held less storage than your smartwatch and AOL was first being introduced to the world.

And, these tools are typically unsupported. In the rare event that they are supported, it’s often by those whose primary role isn’t associated with the tool. Remember all those times you called in for support of a product and found out you knew more than the person on the other end of the phone?

Not only do free tools cause risk to your LOE and deadlines, but there are also substantial risks for the integrity of your data. Here’s why:

• Most legacy data migration tools don’t validate the content of the files they copy. They check for file size, timestamps, and name only – which is bad. Even if a legacy tool can validate the content of each file, they are too slow to perform the task in a viable way.
• Legacy tools won’t tell you if you’ve missed data on the source. As a result, it’s common to see data sets abandoned on the source during the day of cutover when the users login and can’t find their data.
• Legacy tools require a scripting expert to write dozens to hundreds of scripts to bridge gaps in their functionality in everything from creating jobs, to share and export creation, to cut-over tasks. Logging, reporting, remediation? You guessed it, more scripting. An increase in manual scripting increases the risk of human error.

Why invest in DobiMigrate for your data migration project?

DobiMigrate’s value comes from the fact that it guarantees the highest levels of success and customer satisfaction. In order to take full advantage of the “oilfield,” it is important that today’s enterprises are equipped with the data management tools they need to succeed.

With DobiMigrate, customers can understand their data with Discovery and Reporting modules, reduce the duration and risk of the project, and deliver guaranteed accuracy. Overall, these elements provide the recipe for success in increasing ROI on a new storage platform.

Interested in offering DobiMigrate to end users?

Visit our Migrate page to learn more or contact us to discuss your next project.