NEXT GENERATION ARCHIVE MIGRATION TOOLS Cloud Ready, Scalable, & Highly Customizable - Migrate 6.0 Ensures Faster & Smarter Migrations EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Data migrations and the products used to perform them have substantially advanced in recent times. Originally, such engagements were entered into with a generous helping of trepidation about their overall success. Today, migration products have grown and matured to the point that project success is less of a concern today. Clients are now more interested in how quickly and efficiently these projects can be done, and the level of specificity and control that can be applied during data migration. Clients demand efficient migrations performed to their level of satisfaction, with minimum risk. In response, Globanet is pleased to present Migrate 6.0. Migrate 6.0 is like no other migration solution on the market. Migrate 6.0 builds upon the successes of earlier Migrate releases, but turns the archive migration concept on its head with a new design philosophy and architecture that reflects the needs of the market today and into the future. With Migrate 6.0, clients may now leverage hosted resources to perform migrations, have access to a highly scalable architecture, and can define their migration paths with great detail. This guide is designed to demonstrate the new features of Migrate, and how these features directly benefit data migration customers and providers. In this guide you will find out more information about: Migrate Architecture the components of Migrate, how the operate together and how this improves migration performance while reducing risk Migrate User Interface an overview of the primary management interface of Migrate, showing both the new web-interface and new scripting interface for power and ease of use when configuring and running migrations Migrate Workflow an explanation of the paradigm informing Migrate s design, how migrations are executed and how this workflow provides unprecedented flexibility and control Scripting Migrations how to manage archive migrations from PowerShell and why a user would wish to do so Migrate Reports Migrate s solution for providing critical data about migrations to stakeholders Page 1
MIGRATE ARCHITECTURE Globanet Migrate's architecture is designed to be highly resilient and flexible during even the largest of migrations. As a result, all actual migration activity is performed by Migration Nodes, and controlled by the Migrate Manager. The overall architecture of Globanet Migrate is shown in Figure 1 below. FIGURE 1 - MIGRATE ARCHITECTURE The Migrate framework is designed to be highly scalable, offering the highest level of redundancy in the event a Migrate Node fails. The system will automatically detect a node failure, and restart the node or terminate the node as appropriate. Migrate Nodes also measure the available resources on source and target systems, and auto-tune themselves to migrate data as quickly as possible when resources are available, and down-tuning when resources are less available. MIGRATE COMPONENTS The Migrate Architecture consists of several key components: Database - The database holding all meta-data associated with the migration. This database is only accessed by the Migrate Manager component. Manager - The co-ordination service brokering management between Nodes, the User Interface, the Scripting Interface, and the SQL Database. Page 2
User & Scripting Interfaces - The entry point and control point of the system; offering a Microsoft Web-based User Interface which is highly visual, coupled with a Microsoft PowerShell module capable of offering command-line control and scripting of the entire migration process. Migration Node - The actual node performing the migration between source and target. A migration task can be spread across one or more Migration Nodes. Each migration Node operates a set of worker threads for each task - offering very high scalability. Migration Nodes can be installed on the same machine or different machines - allowing an entire cluster (maximum number of nodes is 1,000) to perform a migration at very high speed. Migrate Nodes actively enumerate source archives, which allows users to start migrations without requiring lengthy gathering phases at the beginning, or massive reconciliation efforts at the end of migrations. Source and Target - the source and target API, Database or File Systems that the Migrate Nodes will be connecting to and performing migration into/out of as the migration process is running. BENEFITS The Globanet Migrate architecture allows migration users to design robust migration infrastructures utilizing virtual servers, even those hosted in the cloud. The requirement for dedicated hardware to host migration software is a considerable cost consideration for most migration customers. By supporting the temporary use of hosted servers and expanding to up to 1,000 Migrate nodes, Migrate users can effectively eliminate the migration software as a bottleneck, providing maximum migration performance for each customer s specific environment. Archive migrations are business critical activities, and the applications and data involved in performing them must be highly available. Globanet Migrate s design is very DR-friendly. Nodes take over for failed nodes, real time metadata about all migrations are stored in SQL and Managers can take over for other Managers quite easily in the event of a disaster. Previously, archive migration solutions had very rigid constraints on how migrations were delivered. For example, a customer who has a need to migrate only a subset of data based on content might have to accept migrating all items. A customer who wants to migrate the same data to two different target systems at once might have to run his migration two times (for twice the cost). Migrate s framework, which we call migration flows, grant incredible flexibility and control to customers, enabling them to migrate just the data they must to the new repository(s) of their choice in the minimum amount of time. For providers of migration services, some major challenges include managing access to multiple clients environments and scaling resources to effectively shepherd multiple client migrations simultaneously. Gaining long term VPN access can be a challenging, time consuming process dealing with multiple Information Security requirements from various customers. Sometimes clients will have requirements that conflict with each other, requiring the provider to maintain multiple workstations. Centralizing the management of ALL migrations to a single Manager simplifies everything, and takes time that used to be spent searching for VPN tokens, resetting passwords, patching workstations, etc., and makes it available for managing migrations. Add on the ability to configure, launch or manage a migration with a handful of PowerShell Cmdlets, and human resource scalability becomes less of a concern. Page 3
MIGRATE USER INTERFACE The primary Migrate interface is delivered in a web page. From this web interface, all migration related activities can be fulfilled. From the Home tab, users can easily understand the overall activates occurring across all migrations managed by the Manager. Prominently displayed are two key pieces of information: current migration performance and Migrate Node status. FIGURE 2 DASHBOARD Additionally, migration task performance data is clearly presented, allowing users to quickly determine if any migration tasks need immediate attention. Moving to the Migrations page will allow a user to start, stop or manage individual migration tasks, as well as review real time migration status. Page 4 FIGURE 3 - MIGRATION STATUS This page is where users interact with one of the powerful features of Migrate 6.0: Migration Flows.
BENEFITS The Migrate user interface was designed to be intuitive. Users can manage actual migration tasks and flows on the Migrations page, or produce reports on the Reports page. The interface also allows users to focus on a specific migration and associated tasks, keeping the interface clean and easy to manage. A web interface allows for multiple users to manage different migrations simultaneously, and removes the pain of waiting for an RDP session to become available that is experienced with traditional migration products. Migrate also takes a step away from other traditional migration products by not requiring Microsoft Outlook to be installed. Outlook and MAPI can cause considerable headaches during migrations from scalability and performance to reliability. MIGRATION FLOWS Migration Flows are the framework of Migrate that allow you to choose the components and design the migration process around your needs. A Migration task flow is effectively a chain of components that will operate on an archived item, ultimately resulting in the item being delivered to the target environment. For example, a task flow could be configured to filter a message based on date, then filtered based on message subject, converted from EML format to MSG format, deliver a copy to an onpremise archive solution, then wrap another copy in a journal receipt envelope and deliver it to a SAAS archiving provider. Migrate supports adding third party components into migration flow, for data classification or custom item modification, for example. Migrate flows scale as well. With built-in migration tuning, Migrate can optimize migration flows for the best performance. Migration flows add unprecedented flexibility and power to Migrate 6.0, reducing the risk and expense of migration. As shown in Figure 4 below, Migrate can direct individual archived items to specific workflows, sending particular items to specific target systems, or multiple target systems as a customer wishes. This workflow can restrict data from migration or redirect to alternate targets based on specific filter criteria, and handles format conversion or data verification in-stream. FIGURE 4-MIGRATE TASK FLOWS SCRIPTING MIGRATIONS Page 5
We asked many in the archive migration space what it was about current migrations that they considered to be the most painful, and the response we received was how manual the process of configuring and managing migrations is. In older solutions, every activity, from generating groups of archives to creating filters or attempting to migrate items that had previously failed, is heavily encumbered by some kind of Graphic User Interface (GUI). Modifying migration settings in GUIs requires going through elaborate wizards or retyping credentials in many cases, all to check or uncheck a single option. Over the course of a large migration, all this click time ads up, extending projects and increasing costs. We took this feedback and determined to provide a better way with our solution. Luckily, Microsoft provided the framework we would need in PowerShell version 3. PowerShell is easily obtainable, straightforward to use and extremely powerful. By extending core Migrate functionality to PowerShell, we have given Migrate users the ability to configure an entire migration in minutes, create batch scripts to gather status updates, or restart stopped migrations without launching the user interface. POWERSHELL CMDLETS Migrate extends the capability of the GUI to PowerShell with the following types of Cmdlets: Group Management manages groups and group memberships Migration Management configures migration sources, and adds tasks to migrations Task Management configures tasks, targets and related task flows Component Management - configures filters, converters, etc. Users will be able to write their own batch scripts that configure, deploy and start migrations in seconds. Migration alerting scripts that check migration statuses on schedule and send email or text messages when migrations stop or error thresholds are exceeded will free up resources for other tasks. Figure 5 below illustrates how PowerShell can be used to do regular monitoring activities, such as checking the status of migration tasks. FIGURE 5 MIGRATE POWERSHELL MIGRATE REPORTS No archive migration is complete until the stakeholders accept the project. Most will require evidence that the migration was successful, that all items that could reasonably be migrated have been, and an accounting of the items that could not. Migrate offers this evidence with detailed reports. These reports will provide the level of confidence that clients need to believe that their data has been responsibly handled and that the original source systems can be taken offline. Migrate offers the following reports: Page 6
Summary Report provides an overview of a migration. this report is typically ran in advance of status reports or sent out to stakeholders on a weekly basis. Archive Report provides a migration status report for each archive. Data includes the total number of items, count successfully migrated items, number of failures for each archive. Chain of Custody Report provides a per-item verification report indicating that each item in the report has been migrated and verified as unchanged. This report is critical for migration project acceptance. Errors Report provides a list of items in each archive that failed to migrate and the particular error code that explains why the item could not be migrated. This report is critical for migration project acceptance. Reports are available from the Reports page of the web user interface. Each report is nicely formatted for convenient review, and larger reports such as chain of custody reports are available in a delimited text format for convenience. About Globanet Globanet is a leading provider of archiving and ediscovery solutions worldwide. Founded in 1996, the company is a pioneer in archiving and intelligent information governance, and has developed a portfolio of software and services to help organizations manage data from creation to expiry. Globanet s proprietary solutions include the Migrate v6.0 data migration software. This tool features migration capabilities from numerous legacy archive sources to Enterprise Vault. As a Symantec Platinum Partner with Master Specialization in Archiving and ediscovery, Globanet s professional services team has extensive experience with Enterprise Vault migrations and implementations. Globanet Migrate v6.0 is slated for the summer of 2013 and will revolutionize the way migrations are carried out. Page 7