SAN Migrations – No longer a stressful process!

Technology is designed to make our lives easier but that doesn’t mean that it comes without its own stress. Anyone that’s had to migrate data from an older SAN array onto a new and shiny solution will attest to that. The military level of precision and depth of planning that was required took weeks, if not months and the poor (but incredibly skilled) people involved were put under intense pressure for, often prolonged periods of time. The toll this took on their mental health, interactions with friends and family and overall quality of life cant be measured but was certainly felt.

Fast forward to the present day and its getting easier and more seamless to use and integrate different technologies to increase productivity. I was able to jump on a skype call to my colleague who then had a conference call with a client who shared his screen using logmein so that we could all see him log onto their Nimble array portal. In days gone by this wouldn’t have been possible but any integration of this type would have inevitably been clunky, slow and unworkable.

We all had a good chat whilst we talked the client through updating the software versions on the old Nimble CS200 arrays so they matched with the new Nimble HF20 arrays. We completed some admin and configuration tasks before stepping through the process of changing the group leader to the new array (this requires the logging of a ticket and some remote configuration changes from Nimble support) and how the data automatically migrates over. The time of migration can vary depending on the size of data, bandwidth etc but in this case it could be left to complete over the weekend and should be completed well before the Monday morning zombie walk into the work kitchen for a double hit of espresso from the coffee machine.

The client set the process running before leaving work at the normal time on a Friday and went home. The whole IT team spent time with their loved ones, probably watched some tele and had a peaceful nights sleep and woke up as relaxed as they could be on Saturday. They checked in periodically to make sure everything was as expected but it was more out of curiosity than stress. Come Monday morning the migration was complete and the client did some remedial work and shut down the CS200 and un-racked it… JOB DONE!!!

The whole process was seamless, non disruptive, involved zero onsite presence from NG-IT, didnt require staying late in a cold and empty office till 8-9pm on a Friday evening, hugely reduced the planning and actual migration time and crucially completely took away the mental stress that is usually associated with SAN migrations. The world is full of amazing people working within the IT industry but why should their mental health suffer due to the complex and critical nature of their work? NG-IT cant remove all your stress points but we can use some amazing next-gen technologies coupled with brilliant people to remove legacy headaches associated with private and cloud hybrid services.

Written by Anas Khan, Solutions Architect at NG-IT