Many organisations face the challenge of migrating from older servers and storage appliances to benefit from the latest advances in technology. They want the advantages of improved performance, reduced costs and standardisation of hardware platform, whilst minimising the risks associated with the disruption of service that ensues from such a change.

Dagda provides the ideal application to assist the IT Department with the following migration scenarios:

• Machine to machine migration. This includes physical to physical, physical to virtual, virtual to virtual and virtual to physical servers;
• Disk to disk migration. From and to all types of storage including direct attached, SAN and NAS technologies;
• Creation of development environments. Complete duplication of existing servers for application testing and parallel running purposes.

For the organisation wishing to migrate to a new hardware platform, Dagda can facilitate a Push button recovery to this new platform. This means the migration process can be planned, tested and rolled out far more efficiently and effectively with no user disruption and minimum risk to the organisation.

Dagda facilitates and automates the above migration scenarios across any distance and without disrupting operations or causing application downtime. Heterogeneous replication capability is fully supported, this being especially important for migration projects in data centres where applications may be deployed in different server and storage architectures.

Dagda automates the following key tasks for migration projects:

• Interrogates both source and target machine(s) and automates the disk volume mapping process in minutes without the need for customised scripts;
• Controls the freeze and synchronisation of all replicated data thereby enabling a precise “point in time” copy of the target machine(s).
• Controls the process whereby the target storage system is prepared and the data is ready to be accessed by the target machine(s).

A screen shot of the migration of the source machine (London-SQL) to two target machines (one physical and one virtual) is shown below: