One of the most significant trends occurring within Information Technology over the past decade is the adoption of public cloud computing combined with the use of existing IT infrastructure into new hybrid cloud environments.  Although the flexibility, agility and time to market advantages of hybrid clouds can be significant, so too are the technology challenges and impacts on IT professionals.

Often one of the first challenges faced by companies who want to increase their use of public cloud computing is how to move or migrate their existing applications and data.  For some applications that utilize file-based data or have minimal data use requirements, this may not be a significant issue.  However, for enterprise applications that cannot tolerate downtime, those with significant amounts of data in databases or that utilize block storage, migration can be a major impediment to moving the application.

Cirrus Data has been a leading developer of technologies that enable companies to protect and migrate data non disruptively for more than a decade. With the Cirrus Data Cloud portfolio of products, IT consumers now have several options for moving applications from on-premise to the cloud, between clouds, from captive cloud storage to 3^rd party storage and back again, all without application disruption.

Evaluator Group tested Cirrus Data Cloud in two separate use cases, the first was designed to analyze the ability to migrate applications to a public cloud environment, and the second evaluated the ability to migrate data from captive cloud storage to Cloud Virtual Array storage accessible from public clouds.  The primary factor in the evaluation was the impact on application availability, specifically measuring any downtime required.  Additional factors included the preservation of storage efficiency features along with flexibility, security and ease of use aspects.

Evaluator Group Comments: Our testing found that Cirrus Data Cloud portfolio provides significant advantages over alternative tools for data migration.  By supporting migration between any cloud and any storage, companies can realize the benefits of Hybrid Clouds.

In summary, the results of testing Cirrus Data Cloud products showed:

• No downtime for applications during data migration (minor interruption for cutover)
  • Migration using an on-premise appliance (Cirrus Migrate On-Premises) to the cloud required a few minutes of application impact to finalize the migration process.
  • Migration using host-based migration (Cirrus Migrate Cloud) from captive cloud storage to a 3^rd party cloud array had no application impact (with no application downtime).
• Appliance based migration (Cirrus Migrate On-Premises) supports any OS and application either to on-premises storage or to major public cloud providers.
• Host software-based migration (Cirrus Migrate Cloud), supports migration between systems residing in any location, using any storage including captive cloud storage to 3^rd party cloud array storage.

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