Migrating from EMC Celerra to NetApp

[jfluharty]

We have an opportunity to migrate all cifs/nfs data with over 100,000 shares (yep, 100K) from an EMC Celerra to a NetApp 3160.  We typically recommend Robocopy or SecureCopy for this when it is server migration.  Any ideas on the best method to get this data and shares off the EMC to the NetApp in a reasonable timeline?  We've thought about NDMP backup/restore but we're not sure if that is feasable. 

Any help appreciated.  Thanks, John

[amiller_1]

Hmm....it's still the same method but have you looked at RichCopy?

It's main advantage over Robocopy is that it's multithreaded -- we've found that if you run it with one thread it's slower than RoboCopy but that it's noticeably faster when using the multithreaded capabilities. Sometimes we'll even use RichCopy for the first pass and then RoboCopy before the final cutover.

Alternately, could DFS be leveraged here in some way to move things more transparently?

[adamfox]

Agreed on the robo/rich copy for data movement.  However, I'm thinking about the shares.  These wouldn't happen to be user home directories would they?  It sure sounds like it with that many shares.

If so, then consider organizing your data using the ONTAP 'cifs homedir' feature.  You may not have to create most if not all of those shares which would be a real pain.

[reena]

I agree with both of the responses. Richcopy/Robocopy/Securecopy all are the recommended tools to use. Just that you need to pay for Securecopy and also with this you could move the local groups as well, if there are any.

NDMP backup/restore won't be any easy method, as you won't be able to leverage the NetApp's native ndmpcopy. You would need to go down the 3rd party ndmp backup/restore tools.

DFS is a good way of minimizing the pain in the migrations if there has not been one impletmented already, you could consider that as well. But with DFS, you'd still need to use Richcopy/Robocopy/Securecopy types of tools to do  the migrations.

One other important thing to pay attention to, is the security style of the file system. Make you have isolated the data on the source to either NTFS or UNIX style filesystem and then migrate it to NetApp in their respective security styles. Don't play with mixed security in such migrations.

[jain]

The best option with a little price is "securecopy" which takes care of local groups very well.

The free option will be "robocopy"

[alec_skinner]

hi, 

I don’t think NDMP backup/restore is an option, we were told NetApp's and EMC's NDMP format are not compatible.   This may add another task to your migration; if you need to restore any data from the Celerra NDMP tapes you will need access to a Celerra.