In our first post, I gave an overview of Congruity360’s corporate history and portfolio. The company has an impressive suite of managed services for organizations to leverage, providing vital business needs with a minimum of IT hassle. At Storage Field Day last week, the company zeroed in on one particular offering, one that’s increasingly relevant to modern enterprises.
It’s no secret that data is kind of a big deal in IT right now. People need increasingly relevant analysis of it. “Big Data” is an increasingly unavoidable buzzword. But this is all spurred by the fact that data, information collected and stored by organizations, is increasing at an alarming rate. As such, as organization increasingly need to move to bigger and faster storage, the need for effective data migrations has also grown. Cue Congruity360.
Don’t Hate, Migrate
This starts with a storage assessment by Congruity360. At its most basic, this starts at a look at current capacity in terms of an I/O profile as well as raw terabytes in use, and what they’ll need to move to after the migration. As far as how this assessment is done, they use a variety of tools, depending on environment size and if they are focusing on block and/or file. This doesn’t end at a simple server inventory, but also delves into application needs. They take into account application dependencies, so you don’t schedule moving your database and break every other workflow as a result. This is where the value of their managed service becomes apparent, to be able to migrate without any business disruption or other harrowing experiences. What’s really interesting about this is the human element involved. While discovering application dependencies can be done quite often with automated tools, depending on the corporate culture, it requires quite a lot of person-to-person effort to break down business silos to perform a successful assessment.
On a file front, this isn’t just a simple transfer. Congruity360 offers the ability to do file migrations on-site or to the cloud. This also includes doing a security assessment to clean up access rights for shares that may have been set up too liberally initially. This also includes consolidation of files, looking what doesn’t strictly need to be migrated.
Their migration service also offers testing of failover for multipath. This is especially relevant to organizations who are looking to modernize during a migration, moving away from something like EMC’s Powerpath. Congruity360 tests the entire failover process, making sure to identify any dead paths and resolving root causes.
Congruity360: They’ll Pick You Up
For organizations that have too much data to practically move over their network, such as cloud service providers, Congruity360 works with partners on a solution. They will ship organizations a temporary secure storage device to move all their data quickly. This will then be shipped back to Congruity360 fully encrypted for them to ingest on their end. This actually plays into Congruity360’s corporate legacy, so they have a complete chain of trusted vendors to handle everything from packaging and shipping systems, to engineers to transfer the data including moving IPs, all while maintaining comprehensive data security.
While Congruity360 has a lot of moving parts to keep track of in terms of assessment licenses, third-party vendors, and other considerations, they offer their professional services with simple SKU tiers.
All of this fits into the larger theme of Congruity360’s managed services. They view themselves as the “plumbers” of data management, providing an easy button for organizations without the IT resources or bandwidth to handle these tasks themselves. When it comes to data migrations, they seem to have a remarkably well thought out solution. One that provides a way for organization to get a handle not just on how many bytes they have and how many they’ll need to provision for the future. Instead, Congruity360 takes a comprehensive view on data management, looking at how applications are configured, working with otherwise isolated admins, and provide a secure route for however the customer wants to migrate.
[…] The Great Congruity360 Data Migration […]