streamlining all-flash transformation · hpe pointnext, the services organization of...

Streamlining all-flash transformationA Blueprint for Accelerating Data Transition while Minimizing Disruption

HPE POINTNEXT BLUEPRINTS: HOW TO GUIDES FROM SERVICES EXPERTS OF HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

TABLE OF CONTENT S

03EXECUTIVE OVERVIEWData growth is skyrocketing.

07GUIDING PRINCIPLE 1Identify and prioritize the applications that will benefit most from the new technology.

13GUIDING PRINCIPLE 4Certify the new storage implementation is secure, efficient and compliant.

16HPE POINTNEXT DATA MIGRATION APPROACHAn experienced professional services organization can help you accelerate your transition and minimize risks.

19CONCLU SION

04C HALLENGESData migration is a major undertaking that requires careful analysis, planning and execution.

09GUIDING PRINCIPLE 2A successful transition requires thorough design and planning.

06HPE POINTNEXT DATA MIGRATION BLU EPRINTDetailed blueprint to help businesses efficiently transition to a next-generation all-flash storage architecture.

11GUIDING PRINCIPLE 3Migrating applications and data to any new storage platform can be a complex undertaking.

3 Streamlining all-flash transformation | A Blueprint for Accelerating Data Transition while Minimizing Disruption

Executive OverviewData growth is skyrocketing. IDC forecasts annual global data generation to grow from 16 zettabytes in 2016 to 163 zettabytes in 2025 as digital transformation and the Internet of Things (IoT) become pervasive.1 By transforming this wealth of raw data into meaningful business information companies can accelerate the pace of innovation, streamline business processes and improve financial results. But most organizations simply can’t afford to maintain massive datasets using conventional storage solutions.

Data growth is skyrocketing – doubling every year in many businesses

Human data Machine data Business data1 Data Age 2025, IDC, April 2017

Confidence

Data missed, lost / corrupt

How quickly can you recover?

Implementation of security measures and protect corporate data assets

Expense

Exceeding investement

How much can you invest?

Refreshes and upgrades of storage, servers, personell to lower operating costs

Recovery

Unexpected downtime

How quickly can you et back online?

Solutions to minimize downtime, maximize continuous up time

CapEx and OpEx

Application downtime

How long without application?

Adoption of data analytics and intelligence tools, decrease TCO and increase ROI

Retention period

Performance Issues

Choose tier based on criticality

Efforts to improve performance and maximize productivity

Insight

Optimal Balance

Maximizing investement?

Migration Execution to assure Data accuracy with minimal or no downtime


Forward-looking organizations are looking to next-generation all-flash storage platforms to eliminate storage cost and performance barriers. Advancements in all-flash technology have led to remarkable price-performance improvements in recent years. The latest all-flash solutions from HPE deliver breakthrough economics, speed and simplicity, while improving availability and data durability.

All-flash storage can help you reduce TCO and boost the performance of traditional applications as well as accelerate the rollout of new initiatives like IoT, big data and analytics. But moving data to a new storage architecture introduces a variety of organizational and technical challenges.

HPE Pointnext has developed a comprehensive blueprint to help you streamline your data migration journey. Based on real-world experience, this four-step guide helps you assess and prioritize requirements, accelerate your transition, and reduce risk and uncertainty along the way.

ChallengesData migration is a major undertaking that requires careful analysis, planning and execution. Many IT organizations lack the experience and resources to carry it out on their own. Without proper foresight and guidance, data migration programs can disrupt operations, diminish employee productivity and impair revenues.

Common Data Migration Concerns


Common data migration challenges include:

• Qualifying and understanding data. Some applications and workloads will derive greater benefits from all-flash storage than others. A phased implementation approach is critical to success. IT planners must carefully analyze and prioritize the transition to properly align performance benefits and data value with storage costs.

• Transitioning from legacy storage solutions to future-proofed flash platforms. Data migration requires extensive analysis and planning. System architects must carefully translate long-term business, functional and operational requirements into next-generation storage platform designs and implementation plans.

• Reducing cost, risk and time during data migration. The IT organization must provide a smooth and speedy transition that contains expenses, minimizes business disruptions and avoids data loss.

• Integrating migrated data into established security, data protection and governance frameworks. InfoSec and compliance teams must participate in planning to ensure the new implementation complies with corporate security and data protection policies as well as with relevant government and industry regulations.

Do-it-yourself migrations are fraught with surprises

• 85% exceed intended staff investments

• 64% exceed planned application downtime

• 54% exceed projected budget– Source: ESG Data Migration Study

Prioritize data content1

Define the new platform and migration plan2

Make it as simple and risk-adverse as possible3

Protect data during and after migration4


HPE Pointnext, the services organization of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, has developed a detailed blueprint to help businesses efficiently transition to a next-generation all-flash storage architecture. The four-step blueprint is based on HPE’s extensive experience helping customers successfully plan and execute large-scale data migrations.

The HPE Pointnext Data Migration Blueprint lets you take full advantage of the price-performance benefits of flash, without compromising security or availability. The blueprint includes four guiding principles to help you formulate and carry out an effective transition, while minimizing costs, disruption and risks.

HPE Pointnext Data Migration Blueprint

Four Guiding Principles for a Successful Data Migration


When formulating a migration strategy it is important to identify and prioritize the applications that will benefit most from the new technology. All-flash storage arrays deliver breakthrough read/write speeds with ultra-low latency. They are ideal for data-intensive, delay-sensitive applications like analytics, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and online transaction processing (OLTP). All-flash arrays also deliver extremely high availability and are well suited for business-critical applications and workloads.

There are several aspects to optimizing the adoption of all-flash in the data center. A first step is establishing criteria for setting the migration priorities. Critical aspects include expected short-term returns relative to the effort and risk levels of the transformation. This cascades to development of a phased implementation plan. Typically business and operations teams collaborate to identify and rank applications hampered by performance or reliability constraints of disk-based storage systems. There is also an opportunity to reduce storage requirements. This requires one-time methods and procedures that can discover infrequently accessed data. Once identified, such data can be purged or moved to a supplemental storage tier as part of the transition. The criteria, ranking and collaboration work together to eliminate guesswork and consciously align data value with storage costs.

Guiding Principle 1: Identify priority applications and workloads to maximize immediate investment returns

B U S I N E S S C H A L L E N G E : IT organizations often lack the proper tools and methodologies to effectively evaluate application requirements and develop well-informed data migration strategies.


The conversion to high-speed flash storage can strain existing infrastructure. Organizations can minimize such risks by deploying automated discovery tools to examine the existing infrastructure environment (compute, storage and storage networking) for load scenarios that can negatively impact performance. HPE Pointnext recommends evaluating the architecture to identify changes needed to support the all-flash implementation (i.e. higher-capacity switches). A smooth journey to an environment optimized for all-flash often requires close collaboration between business teams and operations, InfoSec and networking groups.

Checklist:

1. Work with business and operations teams to create a prioritized list of applications and corresponding data to transition to the new all-flash infrastructure.

2. Use automated discovery tools to gain visibility into the performance and utilization characteristics of existing applications and IT infrastructure, and identify remediation requirements.

3. Upgrade IT infrastructure, update administrative practices, and coordinate and communicate activities to ensure a graceful transition to the new storage environment.

Expected Results:

• Well-informed migration strategy that tightly aligns storage investments with data value.

• Prioritized roadmap to optimize performance and reliability for data-intensive and business-critical applications.

• Data-driven plan to update existing IT infrastructure and practices.

Identify and prioritize target applications

• Data-intensive

• Latency-sensitive

• Business-critical

Discover legacy infrastructure performance gaps

Remediate existing environment

• Infrastructure

• Processes

• Flows

• Compute

• Storage

• Networking

Understanding and Prioritizing Data Migration


A successful transition requires thorough design and planning. This starts with the workload and data priorities and performance risks gathered in the discovery phase (Principle 1). These factors get rolled into the specification for next-generation all-flash storage platforms. That starts from technical, functional and business requirements and is combined with a deep understanding of the capabilities of the new platform to produce architectural guidelines. Platform understanding is key to accurately addressing the long-term scalability, performance, reliability and supportability requirements.

A complete picture depends on collaboration with other functional organizations. All contributors must be accounted for to ensure data center networking infrastructure, security solutions and administrative systems and processes are updated to support the new storage implementation. HPE Pointnext has seen that this frequently requires revising provisioning and support systems and workflows. For example, ensuring new storage platforms comply with corporate security policies and data privacy mandates.

B U S I N E S S C H A L L E N G E : Transitioning from legacy storage solutions to future-proofed flash platforms requires thorough design and planning. Next-generation platforms must meet long-term performance and scalability requirements and fit with established administrative systems and practices.

Guiding Principle 2: Define the new storage environment and develop a phased data migration plan to ensure a successful outcome

Thorough planning is critical for a successful transition

• The actual moving of data constitutes only 5% of the migration effort

– Source: HPE Internal Study

Specify all-flash architecture

• Scalability

• Reliability

• Supportability

Develop phased data migration plan

Automate the transition

• Cookbooks

• Scripts

• POC

• Pilot

• Production


As mentioned in Principle 1, a phased data migration plan will prioritize applications that benefit most from the new storage architecture. The plan should build in proof of concepts and pilots to define best practices and build confidence. Migration is often regarded as risky, so this reduces risk and removes uncertainty.

Best practices include standardizing and automate the migration processes through cookbooks and scripting. Since this is a one-time migration, external specialists can simplify the process. Be sure to define success criteria and create a formal acceptance test plan. Well-designed plans usually specify that the transition executes in waves to minimize staffing impact and avoid business disruption.

Checklist:

1. Engage business teams and functional organizations early and often to gain mindshare and support.

2. Design a new storage environment that satisfies long-term technical, business, operational and data security/privacy requirements.

3. Develop a phased data migration strategy that includes proof-of-concepts and pilots to ensure success.

4. Create cookbooks and scripts to streamline the transition.

Expected Results

• Future-proof all-flash storage architecture that delivers superior performance, reliability and economics.

• Prioritized data migration plan that aligns with business requirements and minimizes disruption and risks.

• Automated, validated tools and pilot-refined processes that accelerate full-scale transition.

Ensuring a smooth and successful transition


Migrating applications and data to any new storage platform can be a complex undertaking. Every customer environment and workload is unique. You may be able to migrate certain applications in real-time without disrupting service. Other applications may require planned downtime.

Many IT organizations don’t have the experience and wherewithal to handle large-scale data migrations. They may not realize where risks commonly arise, and how they are addressed. A professional services organization can help you minimize risk and avoid budget overruns and schedule delays. Best-of-breed professional services organizations have the expertise to help you determine the best migration method for a particular application. They also have the tools and resources to oversee or execute the migration.

The right migration method for a particular workload will depend on a number of factors including the host operating system, the physical location of the new storage platforms, and data center interconnect bandwidth and latency characteristics. Addressing these relies on information gathered in the discovery phase to frame the best migration tools and methodologies for each application. There are a wide variety of commercial and open-source data migration tools to satisfy your specific functional and budget requirements. HPE Pointnext has in-depth experience with tools and can assist with evaluation and selection.

B U S I N E S S C H A L L E N G E : Migrating data to a new storage platform can be a resource-intensive, time-consuming and error-prone proposition.

Guiding Principle 3: Make the transition as simple and risk-free as possible. Minimize downtime and disruption, and avoid data loss

A professional services organization can help you avoid surprises and reduce risk

• 83% of organizations run into problems when executing migrations on their own

– Source: ESG Data Migration Study


Choose the right migration method for the right workload

LUN

orie

nted

Host m

igration methods

Hos

t orie

nted

LUN

migration m

ethods

Each transition wave will require communication and coordination for success. For instance, working closely with the business and operations teams to keep the user community well informed. Contingency plans and escalation procedures should already be in place, documented in the plan, in case problems arise.

Checklist:

1. Using the information gathered in the discovery phase leverage the right migration tools and methodologies for each application.

2. Communicate migration plans and schedules to all impacted parties.

3. Refine and test contingency, rollback and escalation procedures.

4. Execute the staged migration defined in the planning phase.

Expected Results:

• Data migrated to new all-flash storage platforms.

• No unplanned downtime or data loss.

• Legacy platforms gradually decommissioned or repurposed.

Host Based

Database function

File system specific

Logic volume management

Fabric volume

LUN

SAN Fabric Based

Storage Array Controller Based


As part of acceptance, IT planners, InfoSec teams and compliance organizations must certify the new storage implementation is secure, efficient and compliant. For example, validating that the new implementation adheres to established security systems and practices. HPE Pointnext recommends the use of strong encryption to secure data in transit and data at rest throughout the migration process. Layered security measures are a best practice to rigorously safeguard applications and data against malware, ransomware and viruses. To improve governance, the new storage architecture should integrate seamlessly to corporate authentication, authorization and access control systems.

To avoid unexpected data loss, scalable data backup or replication solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery will be needed. As part of planning, data protection solutions must be specified to meet the recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs/RTOs) for the applications you plan to migrate.

HPE Pointnext recommends automated data management tools to optimize storage resources and improve economics. They can intelligently move infrequently accessed data to archival storage or cloud storage services to better align storage costs with data value.

B U S I N E S S C H A L L E N G E : The new implementation must comply with corporate security, data protection and data management policies, and with relevant government and industry regulations.

Guiding Principle 4: Protect and manage data during and after migration

Automated data management tools can help you align storage costs with data value.

• 80% of unstructured data is rarely accessed or never accessed after 90 days

– Source: National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center Introduction to Archival Storage


Lastly, the new architecture must comply with all relevant government and industry mandates. Many regulations like GDPR, FERPA, HIPAA and CJIS establish strict data privacy, security and durability rules that impact how you store and manage data. HPE Pointnext has experience assisting organizations to address compliance.

Checklist:

1. Institute strong security systems and practices during and after migration.

2. Back up or replicate data for business continuity and disaster recovery.

3. Automatically archive stale data to align storage costs with data value.

4. Ensure new implementation complies with relevant regulations.

Expected Results:

• High application availability and reliability.

• Limited risk and exposure due to downtime or data loss.

• Better utilization of storage capacity and lower costs.

Protect data, mitigate risks and contain costs

Ensure compliance

Backup / replicateArchive stale data

Secure


HPE Pointnext helped a Scandinavian Service Provider Move to an All-Flash Data Center

Business challenge

• Migrate virtualized infrastructure to a new data center in a different location

• Move 1700 hosts and 5.3 PB of data to a new all-flash HPE 3PAR storage platform

HPE Pointnext solution

• HPE Data Migration Service for 3PAR

• Host-based mirroring for UNIX hosts

• SAN-level migration for Linux and Windows hosts

Customer outcome

• 75% of hosts migrated on-line with no interruption

• 5% of hosts migrated offline with minimal downtime

• Average of 40 hosts/72 TB of data migrated per week


If you are planning a next-generation all-flash data center an experienced professional services organization can help you accelerate your transition and minimize risks. HPE Pointnext has helped businesses around the world carry out large-scale data migrations, moving critical data safely and efficiently, with minimal disruption.

HPE Pointnext best practices, tools, methodologies and experienced professionals can help you with every step of the migration from identifying requirements and planning the move, to automating and executing the transition, to protecting the new implementation.

HPE Pointnext Data Migration Approach

Many IT organizations have limited or no data migration experience.

Common “do-it-yourself” pitfalls include:

• Schedule and budget overruns – discovery and migration can be resource-intensive and time-consuming

• Service disruptions – unanticipated downtime can stall productivity and impact business

• Compliance risks – poor understanding of data privacy regulations can result in litigation and fines

A seasoned professional services organization can help you accelerate the transition, contain costs and risks, and free up IT staff to focus on core business activities.

Project initiation

• Environment discover

• Data collection

• Remediation

PMO

• Target environment design

• Test prediction and accetance test plan

Risk management

• Target implementation and UAT

• Install and implement target environment

Change management

• Migration design and pilot

• Migration design preparation

• Scripts creation

• Cookbook and pilot

Project governance

• Migration planning

• Define migration plan and schedule

Project closure

Advise Transform Integrate

• Migration execution

• Review remediation

• Migrate data and servers

• Migration UAT

• Clean up

Dat

a M

igra

tion


HPE data migration services delivered by HPE Pointnext include:

• Advisory services – Environment discovery and data collection, acceptance test planning and target platform specification.

• Transformation services – Migration design, preparation and pilot; cookbook and script development.

• Integration services – Project management, migration execution and validation, data protection and data management implementation.

Comprehensive Data Migration Services delivered by HPE Pointnext


HPE Pointnext helped a Global Education Company Deploy a new All-Flash Data Center

Business challenge

• Migrate 150 VMs to a new all-flash data center 40 kilometers away

• Minimize downtime and disruption

HPE Pointnext solution

• HPE Data Migration Service for 3PAR

• Live migration methodology copies data in background without disrupting service

Customer outcome

• All 150 VMs migrated on schedule

• No lost or corrupted data

• No unplanned downtime

2000+

storage consolidation projects in last 10 years

Successful migration of hundreds of petabytes of data globally

Innovative

Deep bench of Storage Professionals experienced with HPE and industy storage technology

Accelerate time to ROI on new storage investement sooner

Proven

Migration Methodologies, Tools and Delivery Framework

The Right Vision

• One architecure for both HDD and SSD/Flash

• One protection and retention architecture

• One approach to block, object, and file

• One open and automated control plane to manage from datacenter to device


Businesses are looking to all-flash storage systems to improve application performance and cost-effectively take on skyrocketing data growth. The latest all-flash platforms deliver unmatched economics, speed and availability for both conventional and next-generation applications.

Data migrations require careful analysis, planning and execution. HPE Pointnext’s Data Migration Blueprint can help you avoid common migration pitfalls and oversights. Follow these four-steps to streamline your transition, minimize business disruption and avoid data loss.

Many businesses lack the resources and expertise to carry out complex data migration initiatives on their own. HPE Pointnext can help you at every step of your all-flash journey with comprehensive advisory, transformation and integration services. Backed by field-proven tools and methodologies, our experienced professionals can help you accelerate your migration, contain expenses and mitigate risks.

Conclusion

Why HPE Comprehensive Data Migration Services

© Copyright 2018 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HPE products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HPE shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

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Additional resources

Visit us at HPE Pointnext

Read the HPE Data Migration Services for HPE Nimble Storage Data Sheet

Read the HPE 3PAR StoreServ Data Migration Service Data Sheet

Read the HPE Data Migration Strategies Brochure

Read the HPE File Data Migration Service datasheet

Read the HPE Data Migration Services for HPE XP datasheet

Read the HPE Data Migration Readiness Service datasheet

Read the HPE Data Profiling Service datasheet

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streamlining all-flash transformation · hpe pointnext, the services organization of...

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