Datadobi Announces S3 Migration Capability

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Datadobi recently announced S3 migration capabilities as part of DobiMigrate 5.9. I had the opportunity to speak to Carl D’Halluin and Michael Jack about the announcement and thought I’d share some thoughts on it here.

 

What Is It?

In short, you can now use DobiMigrate to perform S3 to S3 object storage migrations. It’s flexible too, offering the ability to migrate data from a variety of on-premises object systems up to public cloud object storage, between on-premises systems, or back to on-premises from public cloud storage. There’s support for a variety of S3 systems, including:

In the future Datadobi is looking to add support for AWS Glacier, object locks, object tags, and non-current object versions.

 

Why Would You?

There are quite a few reasons why you might want to move S3 data around. You could be seeing high egress charges from AWS because you’re accessing more data in S3 than you’d initially anticipated. You might be looking to move to the cloud and have a significant on-premises footprint that needs to go. Or you might be looking to replace your on-premises solution with a solution from another vendor.

 

How Would You?

The process used to migrate object is fairly straightforward, and follows a pattern that will be familiar if you’ve done anything with any kind of storage migration tool before. In short, you setup a migration pair (source and destination), run a scan and first copy, then do some incremental copies. Once you’ve got a maintenance window, there’s a cutover where the final scan and copy is done. And then you’re good to go. Basically.

[image courtesy of Datadobi]

 

Final Thoughts

Why am I so interested in these types of offerings? Part of it is that it reminds of all of the time I burnt through earlier in my career migrating data from various storage platforms to other storage platforms. One of the funny things about storage is that there’s rarely enough to service demand, and it rarely delivers the performance you need after it’s been in use for a few years. As such, there’s always some requirement to move data from one spot to another, and to keep that data intact in terms of its permissions, and metadata.

Amazon’s S3 offering has been amazing in terms of bringing object storage to the front of mind of many storage consumers who had previously only used block or file storage. Some of those users are now discovering that, while S3 is great, it can be expensive if you haven’t accounted for egress costs, or you’ve started using a whole lot more of it than initially anticipated. Some companies simply have to take their lumps, as everything is done in public cloud. But for those organisations with some on-premises footprint, the idea of being able to do performance oriented object storage in their own data centre holds a great deal of appeal. But how do you get it back on-premises in a reliable fashion? I believe that’s where Datadobi’s solution really shines.

I’m a fan of software that makes life easier for storage folk. Platform migrations can be a real pain to deal with, and are often riddled with risky propositions and daunting timeframes. Datadobi can’t necessarily change the laws of physics in a way that will keep your project manager happy, but it can do some stuff that means you won’t be quite as broken after a storage migration as you might have been previously. They already had a good story when it came to file storage migration, and the object to object story enhances it. Worth checking out.