Data Migrations
Earlier this week, one of my engineers and I went to see a customer in Virginia that is getting ready to migrate their NetApp data to new data center. They wanted to know what our recommendations were and how long we expected it to take. Since they have Snap mirror licenses already the procedure will be pretty simple and the time will be determined by how fast their systems can transmit and write the data. Using snap mirror to migrate data is a great tool, and really can save you a bundle of time and money.
After our morning visit to Virginia, we stopped in to see a Government customer in DC. They are also about to migrate their data to a new platform and wanted our advice. We have been working with this group for several years and we discussed how we were going to migrate their volumes and data, as well as the lack of verifiable performance numbers from NetApp, these are some pretty sharp guys and they have learned over time not to trust the marketing numbers their NetApp sales folks provide.
The lack of any verifiable, reliable and repeatable performance numbers is real problem when customers are trying to select an enterprise storage platform. Sooner or later customers are going to notice that the manufacturer’s marketing numbers are often quite arbitrary.