Throughout my career as both an IT Pro and supporting customers as a vendor, my most challenging projects (and causes of sleep deprivation) were always tied to migration. I have been personally responsible for migrating applications and data - and data centers - from one physical location to another. Between homogeneous and heterogeneous platforms. Physical and virtual. SAN and NAS. On-premises to Cloud. Anything and everything. Anywhere and everywhere.
The Azure Migrate team has done a tremendous job of building an extensible service platform that gives our customers and partners the ability to migrate the vast majority of servers, applications, and databases to Azure quickly, reliably, and safely. Within the Azure Storage team we have invested time and resources in developing solutions like Azure Data Box, AzCopy, and Azure File Sync to help our customers migrate file data to Azure from on-premises and Cloud-based Windows File Servers, NAS devices, and object storage platforms.
As I know personally, there are cases where additional tools are necessary when you migrate between heterogeneous storage platforms. This can be due to your business uptime requirements, the technical details of the source and target systems, complexity requiring expertise from specialists, or risk management and mitigation.
Migration Session during Azure Storage Day
If you are considering, planning, or executing a migration to Azure I would encourage you to attend our upcoming Azure Storage Day on April 29th. I will be delivering a session covering migration best practices, an overview of validated partner solutions, and a few demos that provide a complete solution for migrating all your current data sets. We will be following that session with a series on data migration process and solution best practices right here on Tech Community!
Want to get started building your foundation prior to the 29th?
Start with the excellent new overview document from my friend and colleague Niko Dukic. What types of solutions will you see and hear about as we kick off a deep dive on data migration during Azure Storage Day? You can get a sneak preview by taking a look at our list of verified storage migration partners and viewing demo videos from these partners and more on the Storage Bytes channel in the Azure Video Resource Center.
Partners are key and our partner ecosystem can help you to address data sets that are not covered with our native tools.
Here are some examples:
- Assess your current storage and backup environments to get ready for the migration to Azure and set your company up for success with Datavoss
- Migrate Files and Objects to Azure Blob Storage with Scality Zenko
- Move your big data held in HDFS to Azure Data Lake Storage with WANDisco LiveData Migrator for Azure
- Transfer multipath attached LUNs (and a LOT more from SANs) to Azure disks or Azure SAN Partners like Pure Storage with Cirrus Data Galaxy
- Move enterprise NAS volumes (NFS/SMB/Multiprotocol) to Azure Files, Azure NetApp Files, or Azure NAS Partners with Datadobi, Data Dynamics, or Komprise
- Niko also compiled the comparison of file migration solutions represented during Storage Day that you can view here.
But wait, there's more!
I know, you are dying for a tech deep dive covering these migration solutions and migration methodology. Watch this space for more following the Azure Storage Day event including interviews with industry experts, tech deep dives, and longer demos than I will have time for on the 29th!
More coming soon!
Karl