Data Migration Made Easy
Introducing the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution

When Tad Martin began weighing his options for migrating the contents of his company's data warehouse to a larger, faster storage platform, he quickly learned that traditional storage migration paths can be costly and inconvenient.

Martin, the UNIX® systems administrator at mobile satellite services leader Iridium Satellite LLC, knew Iridium needed to move its data from an aging EMC CX 500 array. But as an enterprise that services customers 24 hours a day, every day, Iridium couldn't afford the lengthy downtime that most migration solutions would impose on its business-critical applications. What's more, Martin discovered that staying with its current storage platform provider came at a significant financial cost - one Iridium wasn't willing to pay.

Then Iridium found the SGI® Virtualized Storage Migration Solution, which gives enterprises the freedom to migrate their data to any standards-based storage environment.

Unlike traditional data migration solutions, which may keep customers locked in to specific vendor platforms, the Virtualized Storage Migration Solution lets enterprises choose the storage device that best suits their needs - an advantage that can lead to better data utilization and significantly lower ownership costs. The new SGI solution also allows organizations to migrate data without disrupting enterprise applications or operations.

Those advantages proved compelling for Iridium, the only mobile satellite service offering gap-free, pole-to-pole coverage over the entire globe. Iridium's Oracle data warehouse is constantly updated with detail records on mobile user activity and service use. Because its data is growing rapidly, Iridium recently deployed the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution to migrate mission-critical data from an EMC CX 500 array to a new SGI® InfiniteStorage 4500 solution.

"For us, the ability to migrate to any device and any storage platform is significant," says Martin. "In evaluating our options, we looked at an upgrade and migration path with EMC, but staying with them would have meant a sizable cost increase. We selected the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution because SGI offered clearly superior price/performance with the InfiniteStorage 4500 and a virtualization component that was literally unbeatable."

Virtualized Storage Migration Made Easy
Storage virtualization - which provides a common way of allocating and managing different storage resources - has grown more popular in recent years. But many virtualization tools have had difficulty keeping up with increasingly complex IT environments.

The new SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution improves the way storage virtualization is done by moving volume migration, advanced data services and storage management onto storage area networks (SANs). The SGI solution leverages LSI™ StoreAge™ virtualization technology. The StoreAge™ management software centralizes management of the organization's SANs, and the solution allows users to migrate data simply by indicating a source volume and a destination storage pool. Rollback capabilities allow IT administrators to recover from any migration until they are fully satisfied that data has transferred successfully.

"By far, the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution offered a superior storage virtualization component," notes Martin. "In the course of our evaluation, no other vendor presented virtualization we considered workable - and certainly nothing this good."

No More Vendor Lock-In
With the new SGI solution, organizations can migrate data from any storage device to any other. They can also choose how much of their current environment they wish to migrate, deploying as much or as little new storage as necessary. This can save enterprises significant up-front costs by not having to invest in large-scale, Tier 1 storage platforms. They also avoid having to implement all devices at once to the Virtualized Storage Migration environment.

The SGI solution also enables enterprises to avoid the cost and disruptions of lost access to enterprise applications and data by migrating volumes while production applications remain online and operational.

For a company like Iridium, non-disruptive data migration is essential. "As we compared solutions, we were looking at a downtime of perhaps one minute with SGI versus three hours or more with a competing solution," says Martin. "Had we not gone with SGI, it was clear we were going to have downtime for a significant number of servers in our environment, and I didn't want to expose our business to those risks."

Access to Advanced Data Services
The SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution also gives enterprises access to more advanced data services that typically are available only through costly Tier 1 storage platforms. Services such as replication, mirroring, disaster recovery, and rapid application recovery are all accessible with the SGI solution, and can be centrally managed via the SAN-based LSI StoreAge software.

"At first, our main focus was migrating our data to the new SGI InfiniteStorage 4500 array," recalls Martin. "But it wasn't long before it was clear that these data services presented additional advantages. The ability to take virtually instantaneous back-ups of your core systems - with basically no impact on those systems - is especially impressive."

Latest Addition to Storage Solution Family
The SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution is the latest addition to the company's arsenal of scalable, high-performance storage solutions built specifically for data-intensive environments. Among these is the SGI® InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF), a powerful Information Lifecycle Management and archiving solution. Whereas DMF is designed for policy-based, file-level migration in multi-tier storage architectures, the new SGI solution is designed for block-level data migration between heterogeneous storage arrays.

Trusted Domain Expertise from SGI
The SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution, which includes hardware, software and services, is delivered, implemented and supported using unique SGI expertise that comes with solving large-scale data management problems for more than 25 years. The acclaimed SGI Professional Services organization serves as trusted advisor and consultant, ensuring that every implementation fits within the customer's IT environment and maximizes their return on investment. As a value-added service, SGI Professional Services assigns certified Project Management Professionals who closely manage each implementation from order to delivery, and who ensure that every project meets the customer's scope, timeframe and budget.

At Iridium, the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution will continue to pay dividends long after the company's initial data warehouse migration. "We still plan to leverage virtualization," adds Martin, who says he will use the solution "to move data back and forth between the SGI and EMC platforms as necessary."

For a fast-growing enterprise, that's data migration made easy.