This spring I had one of those experiences every homeowner dreads, a small repair that quickly went beyond my skill set and tools. A minor sprinkler issue escalated into days of work and more significantly, hours of downtime with the flow of water cut off to the house. Admitting I was over my head, I hired a landscaper who understood my smart controller and fixed everything, including the original issue in 30 minutes.
My home experience in a small way, parallels what I see professionally all too often. Cutting off the flow of data during a technology refresh can directly impact your business, workforce, and frustrate customers. A Forbes article said it well; “Nearly every data migration project is more complicated than it first appears. Failure can result in downtime for business-critical applications, which can cause real impacts for the business.”¹ Your organization’s data is the life blood of your business, innovation, customer interaction and progress. Can you risk migrations that result in days of downtime or loss of data integrity? I don’t think so.
In a recent Principled Technologies study commissioned by Dell, in-house administrators found that using our services kept data readily accessible during all but five planned minutes of the total migration time. When block data was migrated, the process provided nearly zero downtime. That represented a 99.5 percent improvement (reduction in downtime) versus the same migration performed by in-house administrators² which took a couple of days. This accomplishment can be directly attributed to our use of time-tested best practices, our experts’ knowledge and deep experience. In fact, we migrate over 300 petabytes of data annually for customers.
In the case of this study, the in-house admins found they needed to take data offline for 17 hours to perform the migration. How many of your business processes or customer facing applications can afford to be offline for 17 hours? I suspect not too many. The minimization of downtime provides admins with an easy way to conveniently schedule the switch over to new hardware during a short downtime window that won’t interrupt your workforce or business processes.
Keeping in-house admins up to date on all certifications can be unnecessarily costly, especially if this is not a common activity for them. Our migration specialists are current on Dell storage technologies and ensure workloads move with tested procedures that maximize the value of your investment. We design migrations to not only consider storage needs, but analyze the hosts to be migrated, and the needs of the supported configuration after migration to the target array.
Our methodology copies data over a prescribed length of time with the purpose of minimizing impact on the use of that data. Experience has shown us that downtime can result in loss of revenue or become more problematic if not timed right. Another plus correctly identified by Principled Technologies is our Data Migration Services streamlined data access by preserving and transferring data permissions without additional effort by in-house admins.
With so much of today’s daily operations dependent on the flow of data, keeping resources online is crucial your business success, which is why we focus on minimizing disruptions during data migrations. Dell Data Migration Services are built around a methodology to make migrations as invisible as possible to your workforce and customers. When refreshing your storage, have a conversation with your Dell specialist about how we minimize risk and maximize data integrity.
For additional details on Dell’s data migration services or to contact a business advisor, please visit our data migration solutions page.
1 Forbes: Overcoming The Challenges Of Data Migration, Steve McDowell, Contributor, Moor Insights and Strategy, Contributor Group, Mar 15, 2021.
2 Commissioned by Dell Technologies in June 2022.
