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CourShor's avatar
CourShor
Level 3
14 years ago
Solved

Migration of EV Storage from Centera to Netapp

I'm trying to find another solution to migrate 8TB of email Archive currently existing on a Centera to NetApp Ontap.

I have looked into "Transvault" and "Evolve", however due to licensing issues the prices we are being quoted are far too high.

Is there another solution or is there a way to "mass" restore archive back to exchange and then remove the Centera and then repoint EV to the new storage and then re-archive everything again?

BTW we currently have over 12,000 archives with over 8TB of data, 1 mailvault store running on EV 9.0.2 (2 servers - virtual) and need to move to the new storage asap as our support contract with Centera is due to end and expensive to renew.

Any suggestions or Pointers would be most appreciated

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  • rick_krieger's avatar
    rick_krieger
    14 years ago

    Most of what I would have said has been mentioned above already.

    For 8TB of data I don't feel pushing it back to mail server is a good idea.  (would likely be painful).

    Since cost is a factor you could look at Move Archive for some of your archives but as mentioned above this was not the intended use case for this tool and you may not be happy with it for this usage.

    If you must get this done your best bet is to proceed with one of our migration partners (some you have mentioned above).  They have spent a lot of time and energy to develop solutions to do this on a larger scale.  One thing you may be able to factor in is some potential storage savings by moving data archived in older versions of EV (pre EV 8.0).  Couple this with upgrade to EV10 prior and you can also show value of bringing your indexes up to EV10 format as a side benefit of doing the migration.

    One thing to consider is if you have any items that are part of active cases in Symantec Discovery Accelerator on legal hold.  This could also impact your options.

  • LCT's avatar
    LCT
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    It seems that which ever route you go down it will be costs. As you already mentioned about Transvault and Evolve, it's just working out which is the "cheapest". I think ArchiveShuttle (GlassHouse) charge per EV server licenses rather than TB of data but I could be wrong, you might want to fire them an email and find out.

    You can use the EV Admin Console to restore users archive back to their original mailboxes and then setup a new vault store and vault partition on the storage device and then re-archive them again.The cost for this is time and disk space on your exchange server(s). The main downside to this is, it will affect your exchange DBs and production performance and it will take a while to restore thousands of archives. if you are going down this route you will also need to keep an eye on exchange and keep it well maintained at all times during the migration as well as EV.

    Hope this helps a little.

  • CourShor's avatar
    CourShor
    Level 3
    14 years ago

    Many Thanks so far for the responses, re: Transvault vs Evolve there is not much difference between them, however I have not had a chance to look at Archive Shuttle since have been told by a more than one company that they may not be the best for our needs.(guess i'll give them a try)

    I had a look at the Move Archive in EV8 SP4 and need to know how reliable it is as some of our users have over 10GB archives.

  • LCT's avatar
    LCT
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    8TB and 12,000 archives, I wouldn't go down Move Archive route to be honest. SYMC states that Move Archive is not really an EV Storage migration tool. From my experience and others that I have come across it is not suitable for large migration such as yours.

  • AndrewB's avatar
    AndrewB
    Moderator
    14 years ago

    to be quite honest, you're in a bit of a pickle here. you have to weigh the cost of renewing support on your Centera for X amount of years and the risk involved with staying on the old hardware and if you're replicating then that is times 2 plus all the costs associated with running two of those in your datacenter(s) versus the one time cost of using a tool such as TransVault to get your data migrated successfully and have full reporting and chain of custody to go along with it.

    based on the size of your EV environment, the time and effort it would take to accomplish what you're trying to do using native tools such as move archive, export/import, or restore/rearchive would be enormous - not to mention the administrative nightmare of keeping track of it all, lack of reporting, lack of automation, etc. well, it would just be a nightmare.

  • WiTSend's avatar
    WiTSend
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    In addtion to the problems everyone has listed above, there is also the time required to extract 8TB of data from the Centera.  My experience shows that this is an extrememly long process, possibly several months, just to get the data off of the Centera.  You need to figure the time element into your other decision points. 

    Many of the companies I worked with decided to keep the Centera inplace and alow the data to naturally expire.  You can create new VS partitions on a new storage platform.  You should also be able to minimize the cost of the Centera maintenance by going to a per-case basis for support rather than a more expensive unlimited contract.

  • rick_krieger's avatar
    rick_krieger
    Level 5
    14 years ago

    Most of what I would have said has been mentioned above already.

    For 8TB of data I don't feel pushing it back to mail server is a good idea.  (would likely be painful).

    Since cost is a factor you could look at Move Archive for some of your archives but as mentioned above this was not the intended use case for this tool and you may not be happy with it for this usage.

    If you must get this done your best bet is to proceed with one of our migration partners (some you have mentioned above).  They have spent a lot of time and energy to develop solutions to do this on a larger scale.  One thing you may be able to factor in is some potential storage savings by moving data archived in older versions of EV (pre EV 8.0).  Couple this with upgrade to EV10 prior and you can also show value of bringing your indexes up to EV10 format as a side benefit of doing the migration.

    One thing to consider is if you have any items that are part of active cases in Symantec Discovery Accelerator on legal hold.  This could also impact your options.

  • LCT's avatar
    LCT
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    I knew you would comment at some point Michel!!! ;-)

  • TonySterling's avatar
    TonySterling
    Moderator
    14 years ago

    I would agree with Michel to take a look.  I have used Archive Shuttle a few times with great success.  I find it one of the easiests tools I have used.