So being part of the extended HP APJ Storage Consulting team, I wanted to share my thoughts on a preferred way to migrate between 3rd Party arrays and HP.
Having worked with the leading storage vendors in the world, I have seen many methods of migration during my delivery days. There are obviously industry best practices to which customers typically tend to go for as directed and guided by the storage vendor, but then there are customers who prefer to do it themselves (usually utilising host based methods over array based methods). There are obvious caveats of this, host based migration tends to be a lot slower and places loads on the host handling the migration.
There there is SAN based migration, where a customer would have to usually purchase some form of license that gets enabled on the storage array itself, this tends to be expensive (unless you get a very generous Sales Manager that lends a customer a license for the duration of the migration).
Enter, HP Storageworks MPX200 appliance for migration services.
What is it?
The HP Storageworks MPX200 appliance is a purpose built device that can assist in Database/Storage/Application migration from one storage array to another.
Best of all, it has heterogeneious array data migration capability!
Features
- The MPX200 can have both 1GbE and 10GbE iSCSI connectivity, as well as 4/8Gbps FC, FCIP for SAN over WAN.
- MPX200 includes remote online/offline data migration for support between two data centres and asynchronous replication.
- Disaster recovery (DR) capabilities
- Online/Offline migrations. There are some points to note around this though.
- Schedule migration jobs.
- Supported on heretogenous FC storage arrays – NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, IBM and of course HP.
- Fully supported with Brocade and Cisco FC fabrics – this is because the architecture is built on QLogic FC HBA technology.
Use-Case Scenarios
When to use to migration to HP 3PAR
- Heterogeneous Migrations
- Consistent way to reclaim unused blocks across all major OSs, Space reclamation tools will prepare dirty blocks for Thin Provision
When to use to migration to HP XP
- Convert Thick Luns to Thin Provisioned Luns using Space reclamation tools and MPX200 capability
- Heterogeneous Migrations
- User wants to cut over from old to new after migration is successfully complete
When to use to migration to HP EVA
- Convert Thick Luns to Thin Provisioned Luns using Space reclamation tools and MPX200 capability
- Heterogeneous Migrations
When to use to migration to HP P4000
- Migrate FC storage to P4000 ONLINE/OFFLINE
- Convert Thick luns to Thin provisioned luns
Performance
This is the cool part, you can migrate data online/offline at 4TB/HR with a single blade and 8TB/HR full chassis between heterogeneous storage arrays using a user friendly data migration GUI.
Offline Migrations
- No downtime required to plan & configure, Migrations up to 4TB/Hr
- Server with less than 1TB storage can be migrated in 1 Hr. application downtime
- Reduces implementation time – saves money
- Insert MPX200 into the Data path without application down time during migration
- Downtime only when cutting over to new storage
- Keeping Source data “Current” through out the migration process – User can always fall back
Licensing
Of course I leave this bit for last, it is really straight forwards and different licenses for different cases.
Capacity or Per-TB Licenses
- “Fills the petrol tank”. Unused capacity will be available for next job
- Can be installed at anytime, adding new license doesn’t overwrite remaining license capacity
Per-Array Licenses
- Unlimited Data migration for a specific array
- Many sources to one target
- One source to many targets
Supported topology One
Supported topology Two
Example topology for best performance
MPX200 patches into the same fibre channel switch as the source and destination array.
