Vision Solutions, a high availability and disaster recovery solutions provider in IBM Power Systems markets, has rolled out a product called "Migrate While Active Quick Start," a service for companies requiring hardware, operating system or third-party application upgrades or migrations. Information technology improvements typically involve costly downtime, as well as extra evening or weekend work to transfer vital data to the new machine or system.
The Migrate While Active service incorporates planning and testing to ensure data is accurately moved before the upgrade or migration is complete, the vendor said. Users can run old and new systems in parallel modes to verify data integrity. Once the data transfer is secure, the final upgrade or migration occurs. In many cases, it only takes a few minutes, Vision claims.
Generally, upgrades and migrations happen during off-hours to avoid business disruptions during the day. With Migrate While Active, IT departments are no longer restricted to nights or weekends to keep their systems updated.
"Migrate While Active makes upgrades and migrations much easier, more secure and less stressful," says Peter Sa, vice president of services for Vision Solutions. "Traditional hardware and operating system migrations require users to save information on tape, then use them to restore the new system, and finally test and cut over users after the successful restore. During this process, the production system is down and no work can be done. Migrate While Active Quick Start eliminates that pressure." The new service also helps address issues with data corruption in restored backups, he adds.
Vision said the company is leveraging its two decades' worth of experience in high availability and disaster recovery migrations as part of this service offering. The vendor said it will also bring the capabilities of its iTERA, MIMIX and ORION high availability and disaster recovery products. "Vision's Migrate While Active Quick Start is a service that utilizes our software solution to provide an alternative approach to operating system and hardware upgrades-locally, or required as part of a data center move," Sa tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Vision's new service differs from current approaches, which often consist of using tape "to perform a save/restore-and testing is done in a short open window of time," Sa tells 5 Minute Briefing. "If that window of time is exceeded, the customer has to make a decision to cutover, despite the fact not all testing being completed and confidence is not high."
Vision's Migrate While Active extends the window for migration testing, Sa says. "The advantage our approach offers over traditional approaches is that upgrades can be performed and tested over an extended period of time with cutover to production performed when the customer is confident the new system is ready to go online," he explains. "The actual cutover takes only minutes. Both SMB and Enterprise customers have successfully used our approach resulting in significant saved time, energy and resources required to upgrade." For more information, visit the Vision Solutions website.