Storage migration from vendor to vendor
 

Hello all,

The old annoying question comes back again. Due to decisions out of the
hands of the technical people I am facing the need to migrate san
storage from one storage vendor (STK) to another (EMC or Netapp or even
something else)

The question here is whether you are familiar with some technique or
product that can assist in "copying" LUNs from one vendor to the other
additionally with the limitation of not having the possibility to use
fiber channel or having both storage boxes in the same fabric (in which
case the migration could be done using volume management tools through
the operating system). In other words it would be most preferrable to
do the operation

Any thoughts and ideas will be highly appreciated


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Storage migration from vendor to vendor
 

jlreate wrote:

Hello all,

The old annoying question comes back again. Due to decisions out of
the hands of the technical people I am facing the need to migrate san
storage from one storage vendor (STK) to another (EMC or Netapp or
even something else)

The question here is whether you are familiar with some technique or
product that can assist in "copying" LUNs from one vendor to the other
additionally with the limitation of not having the possibility to use
fiber channel or having both storage boxes in the same fabric (in
which case the migration could be done using volume management tools
through the operating system). In other words it would be most
preferrable to do the operation

In other words it would be most preferrable to do the operation over
LAN/WAN. (sorry for missing that bit from the post)

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Storage migration from vendor to vendor
 

Take a look at the replication products from Kashya
(http://www.kashya.com). Not sure what your budget is, but they have
products that will help this. The initial investment might be steep but
done right you can roll that investment into a DR/backup solution after
the initial migration is completed.

They can connect to your SAN (OK, you say you can't do this) or by
splitting writes from the host with a special driver. As I understand
this product (just heard a presentation; have not actually used it)
replication can then proceed locally or over a WAN.

I'm sure there are other similar solutions out there if you look
around.

Bruce Clarke
..
jlreate wrote:
jlreate wrote:

Hello all,

The old annoying question comes back again. Due to decisions out of
the hands of the technical people I am facing the need to migrate san
storage from one storage vendor (STK) to another (EMC or Netapp or
even something else)

The question here is whether you are familiar with some technique or
product that can assist in "copying" LUNs from one vendor to the other
additionally with the limitation of not having the possibility to use
fiber channel or having both storage boxes in the same fabric (in
which case the migration could be done using volume management tools
through the operating system). In other words it would be most
preferrable to do the operation

In other words it would be most preferrable to do the operation over
LAN/WAN. (sorry for missing that bit from the post)

--

Storage migration from vendor to vendor
 

The question here is whether you are familiar with some technique or
product that can assist in "copying" LUNs from one vendor to the other

UNIX "dd" command can help.

--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation

http://www.storagecraft.com

Storage migration from vendor to vendor
 

"jlreate" wrote in message
...
Hello all,

The old annoying question comes back again. Due to decisions out of the
hands of the technical people I am facing the need to migrate san
storage from one storage vendor (STK) to another (EMC or Netapp or even
something else)

The question here is whether you are familiar with some technique or
product that can assist in "copying" LUNs from one vendor to the other
additionally with the limitation of not having the possibility to use
fiber channel or having both storage boxes in the same fabric (in which
case the migration could be done using volume management tools through
the operating system). In other words it would be most preferrable to
do the operation

Any thoughts and ideas will be highly appreciated

Check out Falconstor. They claim to be able to do this with their IPStor
appliances. They are used for this type of migrations by HDS.

Rob

Storage migration from vendor to vendor
 

jlreate wrote:
The old annoying question comes back again. Due to decisions out of the
hands of the technical people I am facing the need to migrate san
storage from one storage vendor (STK) to another (EMC or Netapp or even
something else)

The question here is whether you are familiar with some technique or
product that can assist in "copying" LUNs from one vendor to the other
additionally with the limitation of not having the possibility to use
fiber channel or having both storage boxes in the same fabric (in which
case the migration could be done using volume management tools through
the operating system).

You really have 2 basic options:
1. Use a host-based replication in which case the old and new storage
needs to be visible to the hosts
2. Use an intermediate box that has the luns presented to it and does
the copy in the middle. These suckers are pricey but can be fairly
transparent. If you've got a spare $100K to drop, the moves can be
done with minimal disruption. You would start by presenting your old
storage to the intermediate box (IBM San Volume Controller is one such
product), and then the intermediate box presents the lun back out to
the original host. The intermediate system is responsible for doing
the mirroring to your new storage array. Search for storage
virtualization - there are a lot of players in this game and I expect
some to be good and some to be bad. I don't have hands-on experience
with any of them.

If you're migrating to an EMC platform, then contact EMC - they have
some high-speed SAN copy tools that can help you. We looked at it
briefly but never pursued it.

When we migrated from EMC to HP storage, we used host-based volume
management whenever we could (all the Unix hosts) and a lot of robocopy
for Windows.

Good luck,
.../Ed

Storage migration from vendor to vendor
 

ewilts wrote:

jlreate wrote:
The old annoying question comes back again. Due to decisions out of
the hands of the technical people I am facing the need to migrate
san storage from one storage vendor (STK) to another (EMC or Netapp
or even something else)

The question here is whether you are familiar with some technique or
product that can assist in "copying" LUNs from one vendor to the
other additionally with the limitation of not having the
possibility to use fiber channel or having both storage boxes in
the same fabric (in which case the migration could be done using
volume management tools through the operating system).

You really have 2 basic options:
1. Use a host-based replication in which case the old and new storage
needs to be visible to the hosts
2. Use an intermediate box that has the luns presented to it and does
the copy in the middle. These suckers are pricey but can be fairly
transparent. If you've got a spare $100K to drop, the moves can be
done with minimal disruption. You would start by presenting your old
storage to the intermediate box (IBM San Volume Controller is one such
product), and then the intermediate box presents the lun back out to
the original host. The intermediate system is responsible for doing
the mirroring to your new storage array. Search for storage
virtualization - there are a lot of players in this game and I expect
some to be good and some to be bad. I don't have hands-on experience
with any of them.

If you're migrating to an EMC platform, then contact EMC - they have
some high-speed SAN copy tools that can help you. We looked at it
briefly but never pursued it.

When we migrated from EMC to HP storage, we used host-based volume
management whenever we could (all the Unix hosts) and a lot of
robocopy for Windows.

Good luck,
.../Ed

Thanks Ed for the detailed answer and also thanks for everyone else for
the excellent suggestions and answers.

I decided to bend the rules and manage to stick both SAN arrays into
the same fabric and do the transfer using the host-based replication
(LVM).

Thanks and regards,
JL

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