As virtualized and cloud systems are so prevalent and integral to data storage, the need to migrate data from a legacy storage system to a virtual or cloud-based one is inevitable. But, here’s the rub: migrating data is a lot harder than you might think, despite all the marketing noise about smooth transitions, ease-of-use, and turnkey solutions.
While the term ‘cloud’ means many things to many people, I believe it refers to a large-scale virtualized data center that has numerous clusters of VMware or other hypervisor host servers connected to a SAN storage farm with petabytes of data.