Data Migration—The Next Generation

by Jack Hastings
July 1, 2006

As the captain of your data center, you face many challenges associated with data migration. Storage is growing exponentially. Data availability requirements are becoming unmanageable. Application owners are demanding higher Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). Budget constraints require lower storage costs and higher capacity devices. Data migration is frequent, complex, and painful—more than 80 percent of IT storage administrators experience problems when moving data.

How can you possibly manage all of these issues?

By using non-disruptive volume and dataset level migration software, successful organizations can meet SLAs, ensure business continuity, and maximize IT resources.

Organizations recognize they need to gain better control of their data. We’re living in the era of the 24 x 7 business cycle—and downtime for scheduled data migrations or migration-related system failures is no longer acceptable.

Combining the functionality of its Transparent Data Migration Facility (TDMF) and Logical Data Migration Facility (LDMF), IBM offers a comprehensive migration solution that is unique to the marketplace—one that offers best-of-breed migration performance at both the volume and dataset levels, respectively.



Next Generation Data Migrations Made Simple

First, use IBM’s Softek TDMF to move the data between volumes with “like” track geometries (i.e., 3380 to 3380 or 3390 to 3390). Softek TDMF is a powerful tool, with the inherent ability to provide on-demand data movement for technology refresh, disk maintenance, consolidation, or data center relocation—with no downtime or application performance implications.

TDMF shortens and simplifies the migration process without taking applications offline or impacting performance by moving volumes non-disruptively within heterogeneous storage environments, supporting up to 1,000 volumes with multiple copy commands running simultaneously, and group tagging, which provides a name for a collection of migration volumes.

Additional benefits include:

• Migrating data while maintaining 24 x 7 availability
• Moving data to, from and between any storage vendor’s hardware
• Moving over any distance via channel extenders, TCP/IP
• Easy to use, no hardware or software prerequisites
• Improving application performance by relocating volumes.

After volumes are moved non-disruptively, datasets can then be moved non-disruptively with IBM’s Softek LDMF— a powerful stand-alone tool that is an industry first. Data Migration: The Next Generation Simplify Complex Migrations Using Volume and Dataset Level Tools

Softek LDMF migrates data non-disruptively at the dataset level for volume consolidation and performance-tuning purposes. Softek LDMF facilitates the conversion of multiple, smaller capacity devices to fewer larger capacity devices (i.e., three MOD3s to one MOD9). This helps achieve a lower TCO, addresses Unit Control Block (UCB) constraints, and maximizes capacity utilization to larger geometries.