Migrating Home directories from legacy NAS to Isilon

Do the share names match the users Active Directory/Directory Services logon name? If so, you could use this as a great time to setup traditional home directories. If you migrate the shares under /ifs/home (or other designated directory), the users could then access their home directory using the traditional home directory share functionality. In addition, as new users come on board, the cluster can be configured to automatically create the users home folder.

As a result, you could create a single home directory share, which all the users can use to access their individual home directory compared with having to create 3000 unique shares.

Here is a general white paper on Isilon Home Directories

http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h11152-isilon-home-directories-wp.pdf

Users home dir matches their logon name in AD , our home dir shares are under the department shares , would that be a challenge to keep it as is during migration ? we would prefer not to change any thing and keep as is during the migration.

We will be cutting over the current NAS by changing the DNS names ( global cut over) .

DFS is great totally agree but in our case we will be consolidating all the file services to NAS so stuck with CIFS.

Ed is referring to DFS as a way to "obscure" physical location of CIFS resources.  You can use DFS to present CIFS/SMB shares from multiple physical servers as one "name space". You don't have to use DFS replication or anything of that nature.

I guess you are referring to creating a DFS name space by presenting volume from Isilon ? and use Isilon replication ?