The Butterfly approach of light touch, detailed analytics has been transferred to the Primary Storage environment successfully. Our minimum touch-point, fast Analysis Engine Report provides a detailed understanding of the source environment and a target environment design for transformation, accompanied by the standard operational issues, and robust infrastructure business case. This was borne from Backup and has successfully transitioned its approach and methodology to storage. Bringing together the detail in the backup content and the primary storage, Butterfly offers unique, such as storage utilisation to the host level and thin provisioning over subscription within five days of analysis.
Before the consultants have organised their logon IDs and access permits, Butterfly is delivering the report.
Butterfly has invested heavily in building a migration engine capability to handle the heavy lifting of backup data and compliance data. The scalability, resilience and core capability have been engineered for previously un-migratable data volumes, in many cases, many times larger than the primary disk capacity. In most cases this is above 7 times, meaning that the Butterfly Migration Engine’s enterprise class automated migration capability is proven at large scale.
As Butterfly Analysis Engine has been ‘cut’ in the complex, large scale backup environments first, then smoothly transitioned to Primary Storage – the same approach can now be applied to the Butterfly Migration Engine.
Butterfly Storage Migration Engine (BSME), takes the cloud intelligence approach, and robust migration logic and applies it to the primary storage. This allows the migration of data between primary disk arrays with minimal interruption to ongoing storage services to the host applications.
BSME is available in two forms: BSMEv and BSMEp. BSMEv is for the management of a migration using a third party virtualisation product – supporting Hitachi VSP and IBM SVC. On the roadmap are other ‘in-fabric’ virtualisation tools. BSMEp utilises the Butterfly Storage Migrator capability to complete the data replication at the LUN level. These two approaches are further discussed below:
BSMEv:
The BSME for virtualisation utilises the enterprise class management and scalability to manage a large scale migration from the cloud. All management and control is completed from the cloud migration engine, however the actual data mover is a 3rd party virtualisation device. This device is fully configured and managed automatically by the migration engine, to ensure the migration follows the path configured by the user at the engine.
This allows a single point of control over a full migration program, the benefits of Migration Engine functionality such as scheduling, phasing, optimisation are all applied and the engine utilises one or many virtualisation controllers as data movers to complete the actual data migration.
BSMEp:
BSME for physical migration operates in the same way as virtual, however with a crucial difference.
The migration data mover is a Butterfly Storage Migrator. This migrator completes the migration at a file level between the source and target storage arrays. This allows full policy control over re-tiering and data attribute management. Using the BSMEp product, the migration is completed automatically – however additional rule sets can be applied to automatically re-tier in the target environment. It should be noted that this method still supports virtualisation arrays in the target environment, however the data is moved in without the need for the virtualisation of the existing infrastructure.
Key benefits of using Butterfly Storage Migration Engine:
• Automated detailed analysis
• Automated sizing and specification of the target environment
• Environment wide migration logic planning – all arrays, all clients, all LUNs
• Migration Phasing and Scheduling
• Migration Optimisation – totally unique to Butterfly, the ability to phase migration of hosts without causing hot spots on source or target disk array
• Cache sympathetic migration
• Full migration throttling and control
• Integration with VMWare clients for optimised storage layout
• Storage Migration Engine can be linked to Backup Migration Engine for full planning and execution of storage and backup migration
Key benefits of BSMEvirtual:
• Cloud migration management
• Migration relationships and enterprise migration managed from a single point
• Migration phasing, scheduling completed in the cloud
• Single pane of management despite multiple source and target array technologies
• Utilisation of third party virtualisation tool for the actual data migration
• Control and management of multiple virtualisation controllers
Key benefits of BSMEphysical:
• No requirement for other virtualisation
• Clean migration of data
• File level migration control
• Road map: Automated/policy driven re-tiering based on file attributes/type
• No restrictions on LUN sizes etc
• No source environment residue, such as disk headers (as seen in virtual migration methods)
