NTFS to Centera - Overview of Steps

[Hucky]

Hi all,

Hopefully someone has a bit of experience in this and can confirm some steps and/or suggest a better way?

We're planning to migrate one of our EV sites from NTFS to Centera storage.

Currently on EV8 SP1.  and have 1 store with 4 partitions  The first three were closed when they reached 150gb and the fourth is active/open.

The plan is to migrate all older/closed partitions to centera, confirm centera replication confirming link/bandwidth requirements are effective.  Confirm older archived items are accessible, then migrate the latest partition.

So steps? 
Create 1 Centera partition, use ntfscenteramigrator to migrate all NTFS partitions in to one?
Create a Centera partition for each NTFS partition and use tool to migrate to single partition to single partition?

What happens with the NTFS paritions? I'm assuming they remain...can we then simply delete them from the console and rename the new centera partitions to reflect Ptn1, 2, 3 etc...or will we be stuck with the console showing Ptn 1-4 as NTFS and 5-8 as Centera ones?

Any guidance most appreciated.

Thanks

[TRALSH]

Yes, the savesets will remian on NTFS once complete; you can remove after all migration is confirmed complete.

And yes, you can change the partition name when you go to the properties of the partition.

[Liam_Finn1]

I recommend a single Centera pool for all data. This will give you use of the Centera single instancing which will help decrease your space usage on the Centera

Also remember to enable collections. This will provide better performance

[Hucky]

Thanks for the very quick replies....most appreciated.

So my actions should be:-
1) create centera partition
2) Ensure collections are enabled on all the partitions
3) use tool to migrate partitions to the single centera partition
4) once complete - delete the ntfs partitions from the console
5) rename the centera partition to Ptn 1
6) backup then clean up ntfs disk as savesets are now migrated and no longer required.

Any recommendations on how large to allow a centera partition to grow before creating a new one? or no limit...just keep one?

Again thanks for this.

[Liam_Finn1]

Seeing as you are storing on centera your partiton will not grow on you EV servers, The data is stored in a collections folder then moved to Centera.

I think you are getting your terms mixed up

Each archive will have a vault store, a Vault, an index

On the centera you have a POOL.

This POOL is where the data is stored after it is archived. No more CAB files stored on your EV servers.
The only thing that will grow on your EV servers will be your indexes as new data is archived

[Hucky]

Thanks Scanner001,

So I shouldn't be concerned from how much data is stored in a pool - from a performance point of view?

And now need to check with the storage team on how large a pool they've created for EV, I did provide them with 5 year growth stats - so I'm hopeful :)

So if perfomance isn't an issue, I have no reason to reduce the size of pools...the only time I might require a new partition is if we reach the allocated pool size and require a new one?

[Liam_Finn1 · Accepted solution]

 You can expand a pool size if needed so as you grow you can grow your pool

Size of a pool should never be a performance issue because the pool is spread accross all of the nodes in the centera cluster so basically you have 16 or more servers doing the work as one server so power and performance should not be an issue

I am presently storing 32TB in one pool and the Centera is doing very little work as it is so dont worry about that side

[Hucky]

Scanner001,

Many fears put to rest.

Thanks again for the help.

Cheers

[Liam_Finn1]

 Hucky

If you have the solution you were looking for please make the post as solved in the associated post