A Belgian telecom transferred more than a petabyte of data from legacy storage devices to modern arrays in just about six months with minimal headaches using software from Datadobi.
"That's the feedback I received from my team," said Pascal De Cock, team manager for Proximus Group. "It's just setting up and letting it run. ... We spent more time in the administration part at Proximus doing change management than using the Datadobi tool."
Proximus Group selected Datadobi's DobiMigrate software for migrating its data as part of an ongoing technology infrastructure refresh and replacement.
DobiMigrate allowed De Cock and his team to migrate from a Solaris NAS array over to a new Dell EMC Isilon NAS system, all while avoiding minimal downtime for customers on their network during their quadrennial refresh cycle.
"We had to do some small corrections and afterward everything worked smoothly," he said.
Without DobiMigrate, De Cock said he and his team would have likely needed to migrate Proximus' data over one device and command line at a time.
[Storage] vendors don't make it easy for you to migrate from their system to another. It's even more important to have a software tool to do that.
Dave RaffoAnalyst, Evaluator Group
DataDobi plays in a crowded field, with competitors including Komprise and StrongBox. Like its rivals, DataDobi emphasizes not only its migration tool's ease of use, but also the potential cost savings customers can realize by moving to a new NAS.
De Cock selected DobiMigrate at the suggestion of Proximus Group's storage vendor, Dell EMC. Although other options did exist, particularly labor-intensive manual migration, he elected to use DobiMigrate.
"Datadobi was directly on top because it was a combined solution," De Cock said. "We discovered more advantages from DobiMigrate than just using it for our renewal process."
De Cock said the software has thus far maintained 100% replication accuracy as well, helping his team to maintain accurate duplication for their disaster recovery backups.
Datadobi's two primary software products, DobiMigrate and DobiProtect, respectively focus on data copying and protection in unstructured storage environments.
Large-scale storage duplication projects such as the one facing Proximus can pose a tough challenge for any data manager, especially working with devices no longer supported by their parent companies, said Dave Raffo, an analyst at Evaluator Group.
"The vendors don't make it easy for you to migrate from their system to another," he said. "That's usually harder than it seems. It's even more important to have a software tool to do that."
Proximus Group's infrastructure refresh will continue until November and the company expects to move over a total of 2 PB by the time it's finished, De Cock said.
The telecom serves both Belgian and international telecommunication markets with other sub-brands operating throughout the Netherlands.
