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This document provides best practices and walkthrough procedures for Data Mobility with Non-Disruptive Migration (NDM) and Minimally Disruptive Migration (MDM) with Dell PowerMax storage arrays.
Prior to the introduction of NDM, migrating from an older storage array to a new PowerMax storage array was a time-consuming and tedious process. It required detailed planning and application downtime.
PowerMax Data Mobility provides data migration features to help automate the process of moving applications from a VMAX or PowerMax array to a PowerMax array without application downtime in a non-disruptive fashion. Data Mobility leverages PowerMax SRDF replication technologies to move the application data to the new array, it leverages PowerMax Auto-Provisioning for device masking, in combination with host multipathing software, to manage and maintain host access to the data during the migration process.
With each release of PowerMax OS, Unisphere for PowerMax and Solutions Enabler, the core functionality of Data Mobility has been iterated in order to streamline the user experience and align the support matrix to customer needs.
This document describes the following versions of Data Mobility with PowerMax:
This document also describes the MDM migration feature, in which the source array can be any VMAX or PowerMax running any code level.
Note: For PowerMax OS 10 and above (6079), only Metro based NDM is supported. If you are migrating to/from an array not listed above, see Dell PowerMax and VMAX: Non-Disruptive and Minimally Disruptive Migration Best Practices and Operational Guide.
Each method uses a similar set of commands but has significantly differing underlying architectures leveraging the source arrays abilities.