What is data migration?
Data migration, in its simplest definition, is the process of transferring data from one system to another.
Common IT events that trigger the need for data migration include:
- Cloud migrations
- Datacenter consolidation
- Datacenter migration
- OS upgrades
- Re-platforming initiatives
- Storage refresh
- Virtualization
Common challenges and issues during data migrations
Depending on what is being migrated – data only, whole applications, or entire servers – migrations can have different impacts on the business. Issues with data migration can arise for many reasons, such as:
- a lack of planning,
- staff skillsets,
- insufficient testing,
- or data missed from the migration.
As a result, businesses may incur excessive downtime and lost productivity. Migrations may even have to be aborted, the original system brought back online (if possible) and the migration attempted again at a later date. In the case of missed hardware migrations, financial penalties may be incurred for not returning leased hardware on time.
In the past, data and server migrations required saving data to offline media, installing the new system, and reloading the data. Because of the required downtime, most migrations were performed on weekends or outside of normal business hours, with a lot of off-hours overtime work for the IT staff, and possibly third-party consultants as well. Adding to the challenge, many organizations no longer have any “non-business hours” when they can shut down their systems to perform a migration.
How Precisely can help with data migration
Precisely offers tools and methodologies that deliver better IT resilience during migrations, while minimizing the need for downtime.
Precisely’s Migrate While Active Service migrates IBM i or AIX data to on-premises or cloud systems, new hardware or storage, and even new versions of the operating system. A Migrate While Active Service incorporates comprehensive planning and testing by migration experts to ensure data is accurately migrated.
Precisely's high availability technology is leveraged to replicate data and applications to the new system, without stopping production workloads, and run those systems in parallel during validation. After verifying that the data transfer is complete and accurate, the final cutover is completed with almost no operational downtime.
For more complex migrations involving re-platforming complex mainframe or IBM i data to modern data platforms, Connect both replicates and transforms your data in real-time. Connect supports a variety of replication topologies. Connect will keep the source and target in sync until testing is complete and you are ready to cutover to the new target. If your environment requires a phased cutover to the new system, active-active replication can be used to maintain synchronization between active source and target systems throughout the extended migration cutover period.