Migration Expert Zone

Dell introduced new updates and releases in software, storage, networking, and application-specific appliances at its Dell Storage Forum last week.  All were part of Dell’s “Fluid Data” initiative to improve the way customers automate and manage data transfers. The new technologies build on those acquired in Dell’s recent purchases of Compellent, Force 10, and Ocarina Networks.

One of the new announcements is the completely revamped Dell Compellent Storage Centre 6.0, which features 64-bit system support. In theory, this increases addressable memory from 4GB to 16 exabytes.  The new architecture is also uniquely suitable to virtual machine migration efforts.

One customer that has already obtained significant return on its investment in these new technologies is online and PC game software developer BioWare. With large teams of developers working 24/7, BioWare moves or modifies more than 20 terabytes of data each day, which places heavy demands on its storage solutions.  Leveraging Fluid Data technologies, BioWare implemented a virtualization strategy that allows full shared resources, simple storage classification and migration, and effective data protection—including comprehensive replication—to ensure continuity of business.

Dell Compellent Data Progression automates the management of tiered storage, classifying data intelligently at the block level, then migrating it among tiers based on frequency of access. With more than 300TB of storage capacity, data is written to a high-performance drive on Tier 1 of BioWare’s SAN.  As frequency of access declines, the less-active blocks are migrated to higher-capacity, lower-cost Tier 3 drives.

BioWare also uses Dell Compellent Live Volume to move volumes from one storage array to another without downtime.  Dell Compellent is used extensively to assure seamless integration between the Fluid Data suite and business-critical platforms such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, and it is a core storage component of the Microsoft Partner Solution Center virtualization and disaster recovery program as well as the Microsoft Customer Technology Services incident-simulation and resolution cloud initiative.

Using the products in Dell’s Fluid Data initiative, BioWare has been able to make migration of data a strategic advantage that saves time, money, and stress.