Contain migration and storage costs by archiving data

Migrating data from a legacy environment to a new platform is no small undertaking. When you’re planning a migration strategy, there’s a lot to consider: business disruption, data loss, resource constraints, cost, compliance and security issues… the list goes on and on. But one consideration that could significantly reduce the cost and complexity of a large-scale data migration is typically overlooked: data archiving.

In today’s world, data has become a strategic business asset—to grow a competitive business, you need a mountain of data. And the need to manage that data efficiently and securely is what usually drives the decision to move it to a new platform. But over time, a good portion of an organization’s data becomes less relevant to the business. According to IDC, 60% of a customer’s data footprint should live on an “active archive” and not on the most expensive flash or hybrid storage systems.

When you’re establishing a data migration strategy that includes archiving, it’s key to analyze data that:

• Is over a certain number of months or years old
• Hasn’t been accessed in a certain number of months or years
• Was created by employees who are no longer with the organization
• Is associated with applications that have been decommissioned

By analyzing data usage and by archiving legacy data before a migration, your company can avoid slowing down the process and wasting time and money on moving cold (or infrequently accessed) data. But more important, this approach also prevents unused data from taking up valuable storage space in a new environment, and it helps you avoid paying for more storage than you really need. As an example, moving 50% of capacity to an archive before a migration in a 1PB environment can result in annual cost savings of $1.23 million.

Archiving unused data might seem like a simple concept. But many enterprises don’t have the internal expertise or resources to develop a clear, structured strategy for identifying and moving data to be archived.

Unlike other storage vendors, NetApp offers both archive policy and analytics planning to help your enterprise identify and quickly archive data before a migration. Our professional services team provides consulting and software tools to:

• Analyze data usage and growth across an on-premises storage environment and report on findings
• Identify cold, inactive data, according to company policies, that can be quickly moved to more efficient storage options
• Transparently move data to defined archive targets, on the premises or in the cloud, that meet data archiving and analytics requirements
• Search and retrieve archived files back to systems as required

By engaging NetApp experts to establish an archive strategy for data migration, your enterprise can more efficiently control and manage storage costs for cold and inactive data by more than 40% before a migration starts. Our experts can also help satisfy regulatory compliance requirements for data archiving and access, whether you’re moving to an on-premises or public cloud environment.

For more information about how NetApp^® Professional Services can enable smooth and cost-effective large-scale data migrations, visit our data migration page.