50Micron.com

Pretty cool toy.  Essentially it’s SanCopy for Symmetrix.

So a customer is particularly reticent about upgrades, to the point that they are going from an 8830 directly to a DMX-4.  This is an easy data migration, but they have a handful of test/dev servers that are going to stay on the 8830 for the time being.

So enter Open Replicator.  It actually turned out to be easier than I expected.  Zone the FA’s, mask the source FA’s to the target luns, create the device pairing file, and issue a couple of simple commands on the “Control” (Usually source) side to push the data across.

The fun part is of course that, like SanCopy, if you mount a filesystem on the target side, you have to issue a full sync.  Because after all, SanCopy isn’t like SRDF, there is no persistent cache table tracking changed tracks on the target side.  When the track changes on the target device, the only way it’s going to get copied is if it’s changed on the source side as well.

Very cool.  I always like playing with new toys.