Incipient Delivers Automated Data Migration Software

Incipient, Inc. announced the debut of its newest product family member, Incipient Automated Data Migration software. This new offering streamlines and automates the end-to-end process of data migrations for large homogeneous and heterogeneous SAN environments. Incipient software transforms today’s error-prone and highly manual data migration processes into a completely automated and uniquely efficient operation.

Additionally, with the release of Incipient Automated Data Migration software, enterprise customers with legacy SANs can now migrate their data to new virtualized data centers served by Incipient’s complementary storage virtualization solution, Incipient Network Storage Platform (iNSP).

Background and Inherent Risks of Performing Data Migrations Manually
Traditional techniques for managing large-scale data migrations are no longer suited for today’s steadily increasing and complex data center infrastructures. As the amount of data under management continues to mount, the frequency of technology refreshes, resource balancing (storage tiering) and data center moves has increased greatly. The management of data migrations poses a significant challenge for IT operations with flat to shrinking budgets and growing business demands.

Conventional approaches to performing enterprise data migrations rely heavily on manual operations and spreadsheets. These manual processes often lead to operational error, and error in the context of data migrations can be costly and result in significant application downtime. As a result the risks of performing data migrations manually can lead to a significant negative business impact. Whether data migration operations are outsourced to professional services firms or conducted by in-house staff, the current process and its many manual and uncontrolled stages expose enterprises to significant risk of human error.

"The downside to human error in the data migration process is enormous," said Robert Passmore, research vice president at Gartner. "Human error can lead to extended downtime, interoperability issues and cost overruns. Automating data migration can remove this opportunity for error and inherently improves the quality of the migration."

Examples of data migration operations currently performed manually include:

• SAN discovery: As part of the planning process, the exercise of gathering information on components involved in a migration (i.e. host, fabric, storage) is a necessary requirement. For this phase alone, manual processes can take upwards of several man months depending upon the size of the SAN.
• Information Sharing / Communication: SAN discovery information is typically stored in a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are often passed to many different departments involved in a migration; from the server group, to the storage group, to the database administrator and others. Mishandling of this information and then acting on it is increasingly common and problematic.
• Planning: The planning phase is typically created and managed via spreadsheet. Similar to discovery, this spreadsheet is passed from group to group.
• Pre-migration configuration: The pre-migration configuration phase, where storage, fabrics, hosts and data movers are provisioned and configured in preparation for data movement, is typically performed by vendor-unique "element managers." The user interfaces and data models for these tools are inconsistent and there is no sharing of data or automation across tools.
• ‘Cut-over’: The post data movement ‘cut-over’ phase involves reconfiguring hosts and ‘application bring-up’ requires much coordination between storage and system administrators. Host reconfiguration is especially error-prone for large, data-hungry applications using many storage volumes.

The High Cost of Today’s Data Migration
Industry estimates and field data captured by Incipient indicate that SAN storage is growing at 40 – 60 percent annually and 25 percent of data under management is moved annually at an average cost of $5,000 per terabyte. Based on these estimates, a data center with one petabyte of storage under management today spends $1.25 million annually on data migration operations. Two years later, the data center is likely to grow to nearly two petabytes increasing the annual data migration cost to nearly $2.5 million.

Incipient Automated Data Migration Software — Invoking data migration best practices
Incipient Automated Data Migration software can be leveraged in either a virtualized SAN storage environment (e.g., iNSP software or other storage virtualization solutions) or a non-virtualized SAN environment. It addresses a myriad of data migration tasks including migrating storage array LUNs between alike or dissimilar arrays, decommissioning of a storage array, and scaling to accommodate large data migration projects such as a data center moves or consolidation.

Incipient software highlights include:

• Deep discovery: Incipient software performs deep discovery of the entire SAN infrastructure, creating a centralized data model with end-to-end correlation from hosts to storage.
• Role-based security: The software product includes a role-based web portal for project coordination across IT personnel and departments. Role-based access secures the information and historical audit trails help with compliance and remediation.
• Templates and task lists: Customizable workflow templates and automated task list generation facilitate the planning and re-planning process. This allows IT operations to establish a repeatable process embodying best practices.
• Automation flexibility: Migration tasks can be configured to perform automatically, manually (with approval), or externally scripted.
• Attribute matching: Incipient software can match attributes for source and target storage volumes based on user preference. The software also supports host reconfiguration as part of the migration completion.
• Duration estimates: The software handles device and capacity reservations and can estimate project and task durations.
• Heterogeneous fabric support: Incipient software provides the ability to perform migrations across heterogeneous fabrics.
• Data mover options: As an option, Incipient offers its own network-based data mover that provides unparalleled availability and performance. Alternatively, customers can leverage existing data movers already in place.

"Proper planning is critical to optimizing the success of a data migration," said Passmore. "For years, the planning stage has been overlooked in an effort to quickly get to the task at hand. Skipping this critical step creates unnecessary issues and protracts what is already a lengthy process when conducted by IT staff or outsourced services. Automating the planning and the discovery process can expedite the process and can build in efficiencies that are not available otherwise. This leads to overall cost reductions in the data migration process."

"Incipient is empowering companies with a leading edge data migration solution to migrate data in their SAN environment with minimal staff and cost, eliminating manual process, and without the involvement of their incumbent storage vendor," said Robert Infantino, senior vice president of marketing and alliances, Incipient, Inc. "Incipient software is easy to use, easy to deploy, hardware independent, and allows companies to migrate data on their schedule, under budget and with minimal downtime."

Pricing and Availability
Incipient Automated Data Migration software is available now and priced competitively on a per terabyte basis.