On July 26, in the National Public Radio segment called "All Techs Considered," the topic of discussion was about the migration of email and critical business communications to the cloud. Some major points covered in this segment include:
This broadcast goes into much more detail about where the issues lay, why LA is struggling with this migration, and if companies are prepared to hand over security responsibility to a third party service provider. If you want to listen to the broadcast you can access it here.
Webinar on Cloud Security hosted by Steve Riley, Cloud Computing Strategist for Amazon Web Services, and Greg Arnette, Founder and CTO of Sonian
As cloud powered email archiving providers, we at Sonian know the benefits of running on virtualized servers and operating out of the cloud. However, not everyone understands how beneficial using these resources can be in the IT field. Recently, while surfing the web, I came along a great blog post from ComputerWorld by Chris Poelker. The article is titled "The Data Migration Dilemma" and it gives a great perspective on data migration and upgrading to virtualized servers.
I enjoyed this article from the get go because Chris used a great comparison of his hunt for a new camcorder to a IT department's backup. Before he was functioning with a clunky old camcorder, with the outdated tapes that needed the Video8 adapters and VHS players (who has those anymore?). I remember the chaos of trying to watch a home video on the family camcorder using those same tapes. Nightmares. It would take 30 minutes to find the tape adapter for the VHS, another 20 to rewind it, and then the 30 minutes of poor quality video - not to mention the humiliation of watching ourselves on the TV, but that's besides the point.
Chris pointed out that transferring all his old tapes into digital format, and onto his computer was almost completely painless. With the right equipment and software it was: plug in camera, hit transfer, and off you go. Why is the camcorder anecdote relevant? Well IT backups are often found on tapes and similar technologies to the camcorder tapes exist today for data migration to make the process simple and stress free. In another article on data migration I read called "Data Migration Strategies" by John Shepherd he stated that at any given time 2/3's of the Fortune 1000 are going through some sort of data conversion. That's a lot of data moving most of the time, why not make that process so simple it's a thoughtless process instead of the insanity that is typical data migration?
If IT professionals are trying to migrate data without utilizing storage virtualization the total time it will take, between making sure the new storage units are prepped and arranged same as the previous unit, ensuring the data won't have problems migrating, and the multiple server re-boots, could take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours.
What about with storage virtualization? A few clicks, drag and drops, and MAYBE a necessary installation, you should be done within a few seconds. Chris makes a great case for virtualization while handling data migration, but granted he had me at his camcorder example.
Check out his article in entirety here
Download the Data Migration Webinar.
Learn more about how easy this daunting process can be.