Top Challenges Facing Enterprise During Heterogeneous Filer Migrations

Data Dynamics, Inc., in solutions for the discovery, reporting, migration, and management of file-based storage, highlighted the top 10 challenges facing IT professionals responsible for ensuring the migration of File- and Object-Based Storage (FOBS) from one storage system model to another as data volumes grow at an exponential rate.

Although the majority of file storage systems have come of age, there continues to be a hesitation in the adoption of these new technologies. The primary concern is the risk of migrating from legacy infrastructure to next generation platform. Migrations continue to perplex enterprises as most end up over budget and far exceeding projected timeframes. Data Dynamics has identified the top 10 challenges that impact organizations during these processes.

These challenges include:

1. Inability to manage outages during cutover between business units as prior migration experience has been less than satisfactory
2. Lack of funding for the army of resources required to do scripting around traditional host based data movers
3. Lack of automation, planning and pre-tested design leads to unexpected issues at time of execution
4. Limited ability to move at all levels, (Volume/Qtrees/Share) with single software
5. Optimization and restructuring not leveraged as part of the migration as team is too busy simply trying to move data from source to target
6. Inability to move data across platforms without manual or scripted destination creation.
7. Limited data mover capabilities offer only single protocol support, either CIFS or NFS
8. Status and aggregate reporting is ‘basic’ at best, giving no visibility to business units or technology managers
9. Abstraction based solutions focused only on storage migrations are disruptive and difficult to substantiate
10. The endless requirement to work on weekends reduces the implementation team’s ability to perform

According to market research firm IDC (Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage 2013-2017 Forecast,  IDC #242287), "The worldwide file- and object-based storage (FOBS) market continues to gain momentum with revenues exceeding $23 billion in 2013 and forecast to reach $38 billion in 2017… Growth in the overall enterprise storage systems market can be traced directly to the shift to FOBS."

The management of unstructured data is one of the major unsolved problems for the enterprise. There has been a huge increase in the amount of information generated and shared by organizations in almost every industry and business sector. However, this unstructured data explosion has consumed huge amounts of expensive IT resources, both human and technological, and there is a need for tools that can be used to manage the movement of this data. Solutions that provide unstructured data management capabilities should include the ability to discover, view, report, assess, classify, migrate, move, and optimize the storage of unstructured file data between disparate enterprise storage solutions.

Critical capabilities
that address these challenges include:

• Discovery of unstructured file data across heterogeneous storage resources – This reduces the amount of effort storage administrators have to spend trying to gather information about what types of unstructured data they have, who has access to it, and when it was last accessed.
• Assessment and classification of unstructured file data – Leverage technologies with the ability to find unstructured file data and view it in a unified fashion using a central interface. This includes determining what unstructured file data should be moved or archived.
• Non-disruptive, project-based migration and movement – This allows storage administrators to create projects for discovered sets of file data and then move data sets to appropriate storage resources, whether moving data sets to new platforms or migrating entire projects or infrequently access files and shares to more cost-effective secondary storage.
• Policy-based management and storage optimization for unstructured file data – Assists storage administrators in setting file data migration policies to move files from one class of storage to another seamlessly, as well as identify what files can be deleted to reclaim storage capacity. Using a policy-based management approach, storage administrators can define what kind of information should be stored and where.

"With the growth of file-based data increasing dramatically, the ability to quickly and efficiently migrate data from legacy storage to newer solutions typically results in better operational performance," said Piyush Mehta, CEO, Data Dynamics. "Because of the challenges associated with enterprise IT storage migrations while implementing new systems to cope with storage growth, the requirement for technology to ensure optimal storage use while providing the highest level of uptime and performance is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have."