Sureline Systems’ Briefing Note
Hyperconvergence and the cloud make similar claims to lure IT professionals to their products and services. Both solutions claim to simplify IT and eliminate the need for technology refreshes. For the most part these claims are valid. However, one of the challenges organizations face is migrating their applications to the new platform. Addressing the migration challenge is a critical first step for IT professionals to consider when making the move to either hyperconverged or cloud architectures.
Migration is more complicated than copying data from the old system to the new one. Hyperconverged systems, for example, may not always use the same hypervisor as the original platform. Cloud providers almost certainly do not use the same hypervisor as the original platform. There is also the complexity of migrating an application that is distributed across multiple virtual machines (VM). Making sure these VMs all migrate at the same time and that their data is in sync can be a daunting task.
Finally, there are physical servers that do not map into any hyperconverged system or any cloud. There are open source tools that can convert physical servers to virtual server but they don’t always make the conversion automatically, leaving IT professionals to manually convert the remaining VMs, which is both time consuming and prone to error.
Sureline claims that their SUREedge-Migrator can move any application from any source to any target. It is an ideal solution for organizations looking to move to a hyperconverged platform from a more traditional hypervisor cluster. Once your hyperconverged system is installed and are ready to migrate your workloads, SUREedge-Migrator will replicate a baseline copy of your complete application and data and transforms to the hypervisor run by the hyperconvered system without disrupting your production servers.
Once the baseline copy is complete, you can test the migration workload on a hyperconverged system in a sandbox while your production system continues to run, on the original platform, without disruption. Once you are satisfied with the migration workload operations, SUREedge-Migrator performs a quick sync of any changed data and it completes the migration of your physical or VMs from the legacy architecture to the hyperconverged one. Again, for applications that are made up of multiple VMs it creates consistency groups, which ensures data consistency between the VMs that make up the application.
Sureline’s migration is not limited to migrating from legacy architectures to hyperconverged ones. If the organization has a cloud first type of initiative, they can migrate directly to public cloud providers like Google GCP, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or a variety of MSPs.
From Migration to Business Continuance
The problem with most migration tools is they are a one hit wonder. Once they migrate applications and data to the new environment the existing business continuance solution is broken. But not the case for Sureline’s solution. You can expand SUREedge-Migrator beyond migration to business continuance with SUREedge-DR. Sureline uses a process similar to its migration steps to make almost any remote site a DR site.
The remote site can be an organization’s branch office or a public, private or hybrid cloud provider or a managed service provider. After building the baseline copy SUREedge-DR continuously updates the chosen DR site with incremental data. If that site is one of the public cloud provider sites, the organization essentially has its own disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) capability. DRaaS enables organizations to get the full benefit of a DR site without the upfront investment in hardware.
StorageSwiss Take
Migration from old systems to new is something people often overlook when considering a move to a new architecture like hyperconvergence. The result is one of those “oops” moments in IT where the vendor and the customer are left scrambling for a solution, often disrupting day-to-day operations. Instead, companies should plan their move to a hyperconverged architecture or cloud provider so it goes smoothly without disruptions. The value of a solution like Sureline’s is it allows an organization to buy their migration software now, and leverage for business continuance while deciding on a new platform. When the organization makes its decision it has everything in place to make the migration secure and cost effective. And after the migration, they still have an efficient business continuance solution.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer of StorONE. Prior to StorONE, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland, which StorONE acquired in March of 2020. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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