Solutions

Data Migration Solutions

Move files between devices--without downtime and without affecting users

You might need to perform data migration--the process of moving data between storage devices--for any number of reasons, including file server or Network Attached Storage (NAS) consolidations, lease rollovers, platform upgrades, and vendor transitions. These migrations are often costly, time-consuming, and disruptive, and they almost always require service outages and manual reconfiguration of client systems and applications.

F5's intelligent file virtualization solution enables file-based data migration without downtime and without complex reconfiguration. Data migrations can take place automatically, online, and without disrupting your business.

Why do I need file-based data migration?

Business benefits of using F5 for file-based data migration include:

  • No client reconfiguration required.
    This can reduce migration times by as much as 90%, speeding upgrades, consolidations, and storage platform changes.
  • No impact on user access.
    Powerful policies can automate the movement of entire file systems or just individual files between heterogeneous storage devices for both NFS and CIFS-oriented data.
  • Reduced operational overhead.
    A result of streamlining migration with automated data movement.
  • No need for stubs, pointers, or log files for data movement.
    These can reduce availability and add complexity to the backup and restore window.

Migrate huge amounts of data non-disruptively with solutions from F5

How do I implement file-based data migration?

When you use intelligent file virtualization to implement a capacity balancing plan, you virtualize your file storage environment. This eliminates the rigid mapping between clients and physical file location, and creates a logical representation of file content. In this virtualized environment, data is free to move across existing systems and excess capacity can be shared transparently without affecting clients. Storage provisioning becomes a simple, non-disruptive task.

Resources

DevCentral Community

F5 Devcentral, is our community driven site that helps customers and partners maximize the effectiveness of F5 technologies & solutions.

F5 Knowledge Base

The AskF5 Knowledge Base has product manuals, security advisories, and release notes on F5 products.

What F5 offerings do I need for a data migration solution?

F5 ARX® intelligent file virtualization devices make the physical location of files irrelevant in terms of file access, so you can create a single, unified pool of storage within a multi-vendor, heterogeneous infrastructure. These devices provide a rich set of management policies that allow the movement of data in real-time, based on capacity demand. F5 solutions also eliminate "vendor lock-in," so you can choose the storage technology you need based on business and IT requirements.

Products or technologies that apply to this solution