Research conducted to quantify the issues, downtime and challenges associated with data migration has concluded that where data needs to be moved from one server to another as part of a technology refresh program, a Unix-to-Linux migration or for load balancing purposes, the project will almost always bust the budget and the planned downtime window.
The survey of 256 large businesses in Europe and another 300 large enterprises in the US was carried out by Softek Storage Solutions Corp, the storage software developer formed by a management buyout from the Fujitsu group.
Data migration projects occur frequently, are complex and can be risky should they impact on application availability, the vendor said. Some 57% of the respondents reported migrating data on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, and 64% of the respondents take more than 2 weeks to plan a migration. As many as 82% ran into problems when migrating data.
One of the reasons it is more painful than expected is that there is a lack of tools being applied that can offer non-disruptive automated support for data migration said Amena Ali, Softek’s senior VP. She added that the almost constant use of applications like email and online processing systems reduces the window of opportunity for data migration.
One result of this is that as many as 75% of all the enterprises polled by Softek avoid application downtime by tackling data migration projects at the weekends, which only adds to the cost. Only 38% are using on-line replication solutions.
Most data migration projects are driven mostly by hardware swaps but the notion of information lifecycle management (ILM), which is starting to gain currency, is also pushing demand.
ILM first calls for the creation of tiered storage schema before the data is classified. Then decisions need to be made over how the data is migrated between tiers.
Softek positions its Replicator line as to one tool to carry out those migrations, the current versions being Replicator for Unix and Replicator for NT. This week it will extend the portfolio further, unveiling Unix-to-Linux and an MVS migration toolset.