Double-Take Workload Portability: X2X Server and Storage Migration Solutions

DOUBLE-TAKE WORKLOAD PORTABILITY:X2X Server and Storage Migration Solutions
Whitepaper Double-Take Software, Inc. Published: April 2009
Executive SummaryMigrating applications, systems and data has always been a challenge for IT staff; in fact, most have just gottenused to the pain and suffering that comes with migrations. To properly migrate applications and data to newplatforms involves risk and takes time to complete, meanwhile users have to stop changing data while it'smigrated. The larger the storage footprint, the longer that it's going to take, and migrations routinely takehours or days to complete.
IT staff usually cobbles together a range of tools to perform migrations, but successful migration is far fromquick or assured. Manually configuring the new platform to match the original system as close as possible andthe testing, testing and more testing to ensure that the applications are functioning correctly on the newplatform add to the time, expense and hassle of migrations.
Common Migration TriggersVirtualization - Physical to virtual migration (P2V) seems to get all the media attention, but applicationvirtualization isn't a sure thing. What about when your production applications can't perform after you'vevirtualized them? What about changing virtualization vendors? What if you don't want to take your productionapplications offline while the entire machine is virtualized?
Hardware Refresh - Hardware refresh usually has to happen once hardware has exceeded its warranty, leaseperiod or useful lifetime. Regardless of the reason, you need to move your data as quickly as possible andreduce the amount of interruption to the business processes that depend on the affected systems.
Hardware Upgrade - When your systems outgrow the system that they're running on, you have few choices butto give it more compute and/or storage resources. If the system is already at full capacity, then your only choiceis to migrate to bigger hardware.Changing Vendors - Disparate platforms seldom work together seamlessly, so while migrating data assets maybe simple between two arrays from the same manufacturer, they can rarely communicate with a different modelor manufacturer, thus forcing risky and manual migration processes that require application downtime.
We thought there should be a better way to perform server and storage migration - a way that eliminates userimpact and reduces risk - so we built one. Read on to find out how you can greatly reduce IT total cost ofownership and take your weekends back.
IntroductionŽDouble-Take Move provides migration functionality that dramatically reduces the impact and risk ofmigrations in the data center and across any geographic distance. Double-Take Move has a patented andaward-winning replication engine that provides real-time, byte-level data replication and ensures transactionconsistency without affecting users and production applications. The remainder of this whitepaper discussesconcerns that affect data, application and whole system migration. It also explores existing methods ofperforming migrations and use case scenarios that describe a way to change how you perform migrations.
www.doubletake.com | 888-674-9495Migration NeedsMigration has different impact depending on what you're migrating (data only, whole applications, configurationsand system state or multi-tiered applications). Migrating data between systems is easiest on the surface because itappears that you would just have to copy data to a new environment. However, as file servers and databases havegrown over the years, the time that it takes to copy all of those bytes have grown as well. Copying 1 terabyte ofdata (1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or one trillion bytes) is a task that can easily take hours to complete over the fastestnetworks with the fastest storage. But what about the migration needs of entire servers? How do disparateplatforms and geographic distance requirements affect your migration plans?
Data MigrationPerforming data migration of a file server using traditional copy and file synchronization tools requires you toensure that users can't change any data while the migration takes place so that any files modified after they werecopied won't be lost. You may also need to create a plan for recreating the file shares, permissions, compression,encryption and other settings on the new storage - which can mean hours of downtime and allocating amainten... [download for more]