Storage and Availability Management

A group of DBAs that manage large databases at a large federal government agency had the challenge of migrating a mission-critical 35 TB database from a Fujitsu 2500 running Solaris to an IBM P595 running AIX within a 4 hour maintenance window. Using the tools that the database vendor offered, the estimated time to move that much data was in the neighborhood of 3 weeks, which was unacceptable. Database migration tools from another company were evaluated but they were cost prohibitive.

A Symantec Sales Engineer suggested that these DBAs use the Portable Data Container (PDC) feature within Storage Foundation, which was already deployed in their infrastructure. He explained that with PDC, instead of moving the data from one storage location to another, the data can be unmounted from the Solaris system and mounted on the AIX system. The entire process would take no more than 30 minutes.

The PDC feature was tested in the customer’s lab environment and was put in...