Application Scenarios
SmartMigration enables you to migrate data within a storage system or between heterogeneous storage systems. This feature has a wide application use but is best suited to scenarios that involve storage system replacement, and legacy storage resource reuse.
Storage System Replacement
As services continue to grow, more space is required for storing more and more data. Existing storage systems cannot provide satisfactory data storage capacity and performance, meaning that many businesses are looking for a new storage system that provides larger capacity and better performance to replace the existing one. However, this may cause software and hardware incompatibility issues between the two storage systems, causing long-time service interruption during data migration or even data loss as a result. SmartMigration can work with SmartVirtualization to migrate service data to the new storage system. You can use the LUN takeover function of SmartVirtualization to map external LUNs from the existing storage system to eDevLUNs of the new storage system and take over the external LUNs on the new storage system. SmartMigration allows you to fully and reliably migrate service data from the existing storage system to the new one. What's more, host services can be running during migration.
SmartVirtualization takes over external LUNs offline or online. The online takeover does not interrupt host services, however there is a short service suspension with offline takeover.
Figure 1-6 shows data migration from an existing storage system to a new storage system.
In this scenario, SmartMigration identifies the existing storage system as a heterogeneous storage system and the new storage system as a local storage system.
Legacy Storage Resource Reuse
After an existing storage system is replaced with a new one, some cold data in the new storage system is infrequently accessed. If massive amounts of such data is stored in the new storage system, the storage resource utilization of the storage system is reduced, causing a high proportion of idle storage space. To reduce operation expenditure (OPEX) by reusing legacy resources, SmartMigration can work with SmartVirtualization to migrate cold data to the legacy storage system. You can use the LUN takeover function of SmartVirtualization to map external LUNs from the existing storage system to eDevLUNs of the new storage system and take over the external LUNs on the new storage system. SmartMigration allows you to fully and reliably migrate service data from the new storage system to the existing one. During migration, host services can be running.
Figure 1-7 shows data migration from a new storage system to an existing storage system.
In this scenario, SmartMigration identifies the existing storage system as a heterogeneous storage system and the new storage system as a local storage system.
