Hi there, my name is Katie Morgan and I'm with the IBM Cloud team
and today I'm going to be talking about data migration.
So, before you can actually start using the cloud,
you'll have to first figure out
how you're actually going to get your data to the cloud.
In my experience, there are 3 primary factors that you should be considering
when you're looking at data transfer methods.
The first being the type of workload that you're moving,
and the second is how much data are you moving.
Thirdly, how quickly do you need the transfer to occur?
So, for large scale data migrations,
and by large, I mean terabytes to petabytes worth of data,
cloud providers will typically provide you with a portfolio of options
such as products, services
- that enable you to move your data from point A to point B.
And most of these portfolios span two primary categories:
offline transfer and online transfer.
For offline transfer, which is great if you're in a remote location
or if you're in a place where high-speed connections just
are unavailable or are just cost prohibitive to you.
Offline transfer options are great because they leverage
portable storage devices to move your data from point A to point B.
The first being a customer-owned device.
And what that looks like is you sending in your own piece of hardware
whether it's a USB stick, external hard drive, CD, DVD, or something like that,
to a cloud provider's data center for connection.
And once that device is mounted, depending on the cloud provider,
either you will remotely control that data transfer,
or they will initiate the transfer on your behalf.
Once the transfer is complete, they'll ship the device back to you,
or some providers actually offer to destroy the device
on your behalf if that's not something that you're interested in.
So, not a hard and fast rule,
but we often recommend a customer-owned device transfer method
for workloads that are 10 terabytes or less in size.
Again, not as strict rule, but a good rule of thumb to go by.
And for workloads that exceed that ten-terabyte capacity,
we'll often point people towards provider-owned device offline transfer options.
And what that really looks like is your cloud provider
shipping you a large capacity portable storage device
to your location for you to put your data on to it
and then immediately send back to the cloud provider's data center.
Once it gets back to that cloud provider,
they're going to immediately offload your data from that device
and into your target caught environment.
Once the transfer is complete, absolutely go free and access your data
while the cloud provider will securely wipe that device of your data
and immediately to return the device to inventory for reuse for the next customer.
So, similar to the customer-owned device,
we use this as the standard benchmark for capacities
when using a provider-owned device,
and that's really tens of terabytes to hundreds.
It depends on the cloud provider that you're working with.
Some of the devices actually span from single terabytes in capacity
all the way up to a petabyte scale,
it just depends on who you're working with and what you're trying to do.
And finally, if you're really not looking for an offline transfer,
you want to transfer data over the network,
or you're really looking for that high speed technology,
that's when you want to consider an online transfer option.
You can write custom applications using high-speed transfer libraries
or spin up a high-speed transfer client at your location
and connect it to the cloud provider's high-speed server cluster.
Something to consider with online transfer, as well as offline,
as I'm sure you can tell your network connections and speed significantly impact
all of these options but especially the online transfer.
If you're thinking that your transfer time is really going to creep up
into that week-long or plus duration for a migration,
you might want to consider a combination of any of these offerings
or really an offline transfer.
The longer that you spend migrating using over-the-network options,
the longer that it will take and the higher the cost, typically.
So, if you're looking to drive down costs you definitely want to keep that in mind.
And then, finally, just a couple of things that you should
probably consider with some of these offerings:
with the customer-owned device, definitely look at your cloud provider's web page.
They'll do a good job of outlining any hardware specifications or requirements
so that you are
able to send a device that's actually compatible with what they're looking for.
For the provider-owned device area,
you definitely want to look at their web pages and see
any features and benefits that the varying devices and capacities will offer.
The size of your workload will really
determine what capacity you're looking for in terms of device.
And then extra bells and whistles like GPS tracking or edge computing,
definitely look and see if any of those peak your interest
and see if the device models match.
Thanks for watching this video on data migration.
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