Complex Data Migrations

A customer needed to transfer a large amount of data to a replacement system when their application reached the end of its support life.

The Customer Problem

Install new storage, convert proprietary data to a replacement system and be operational in 48 hours.

We were contacted by a referral customer on an early Friday morning. Their legacy application had reached the end of its support life leaving them with a large store of critical data in a proprietary format. All of the data needed to be converted to another format and migrated to the new replacement system they had already purchased. We had two days to solve the problem.

Our Solution

Leveraging the extraction and data transformation tools we developed as part of our data analytics solutions, we were able find a method to extract the proprietary format data into an open standard suitable for ingestion into the new system. Once our approach was validated and data integrity was verified, we ran thousands of directories each as separate parallel conversion jobs.

The result was extraction and conversion of more than 250 terabytes of data in 26 hours from the legacy system directly into the database of the new system. The new system was deployed to the customer's application test group by Sunday night and on Monday morning it was business as usual for our customer.

We were able to deploy 360 terabytes of data storage capacity for this project in less than 24 hours after we received the initial call. Using commodity hardware, we assembled, tested and installed the system the same day. Three years later, we continue to add additional space for their ongoing needs.