Distributor TD SYNNEX has a physical data migration offering using a Western Digital flash server chassis and MinIO object storage.
This is quite different from software-defined data migration services from suppliers such as Cirrus Data, Datadobi, Data Dynamics, Komprise, which rely on network data transmission. It is akin to Seagate’s Lyve Drive Mobile Array offering, with its six drive bays for physically transporting data on the drives.
Matt Dyenson, SVP, Product Management at TD SYNNEX said: “Speed and efficiency are crucial to avoiding system downtime and, consequently, lost revenue during data migration, which can be a costly, frustrating and risky process for any organization.”
The SYNNEX service is based on a rental deal to physically migrate data using Western Digital’s Ultrastar Edge Transportable Edge Server which comes in a wheeled transport case. This has a 2RU chassis containing 40 CPU cores (2 x 20-core Xeon Gold 6230T 2.1GHz processors), a Tesla T4 GPU, and 512GiB of memory fronting 8 x Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe 7.68TB SSDs, and 100GbitE networking.
That totals 61.44TB – not an especially large dataset capacity. Not when Solidigm has a single 61.44TB SSD announced. Data is stored using MinIO object storage with its erasure coding, encryption, and object locking.
Kris Inapurapu, Chief Business Officer at MinIO, played the repatriation card, saying: “Our high-performance, cloud-agnostic object storage perfectly complements TD SYNNEX’s suite of services. As customers migrate data and repatriate from the cloud they need a combination of resilience, security and logistical support – this solution delivers just that.”
Businesses can schedule windows to take delivery of the Western Digital hardware and pay for what they need during the rental period.
TD SYNNEX’s website has a Data Migration Service microsite that says the “offering delivers an integrated, tested solution that lets you safely and securely ship all the required components you need overnight to provide a quick, easy and cost-effective path for physically migrating data.”
The software-defined services above provide a framework within which data sources are scanned to identify a migration dataset, data set files (or blocks with Cirrus) are transmitted to a target system, the data movement is verified and, when migration is complete, a cutover process can be instituted. These framework elements are not included in the SYNNEX offering.
Instead SYNNEX says customers “select the date(s) for your data migration and we will ship the transportable migration platform to you directly. Rentals begin at a ten-day minimum.” There is nothing about how the data is extracted from the Ultrastar/MinIO chassis and moved to the destination system. This will be a manual process.
