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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