GVB Success Story - Migrating to Nutanix Files with Atempo Miria

GVB (Amsterdam) migrates to Nutanix Files with Atempo Miria

“Our migration of over 1200 Windows shares and 66 million files to Nutanix Files needed to be accomplished as smoothly and as rapidly as possible. With a minimum of impact to our users. Atempo and Nutanix teams handled the whole project perfectly in under 3 weeks. We are now fully functional on Nutanix Files and benefiting from the performance and cost reductions of their Enterprise scale out file storage solution.”

Henk Kleine, Systems Administrator and Data Migration Project Manager at GVB (Amsterdam Transportation).

The Challenge

Two years ago, GVB decided to create a Hybrid Cloud using Microsoft Azure and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. GVB opts for a Cloud first strategy where applications will land in Azure unless this is not possible. GVB is using Nutanix Enterprise Cloud for their most critical workloads and for legacy applications which are unable to run in Azure. For their NAS/Files environment, GVB decided to use Nutanix Files. The Nutanix solution results in a huge simplification in management, more insights, a better security and better scalability/flexibility. Helping GVB to invest more time in projects and innovation instead of daily management.

To migrate the existing 100TB on application and user data from Windows File Servers to Nutanix Files, Nutanix advised to use Atempo Miria for a fast and seamless migration. We spoke to Henk Kleine, Systems Administrator with GVB and the data migration project manager to learn more about the move to Nutanix Files and to hear how the recent migration had gone. 

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The Solution

With 20 Gbp/s of bandwidth between the source storage and the Nutanix Files target, a single Miria Data Mover was necessary. Successive migration synchronizations ran for batches of 100 shares at a time. Each synchronized data set was checked for file numbers, volumes and data integrity. Using Miria’s friendly user interfaces, the sequential migration jobs were simple to schedule. Henk was quickly able to manage the process on his own and appreciated supervision from Atempo and Nutanix Professional Services teams who kept a close, socially distanced eye on progress.

The final cutover was possible after just two and a half weeks, well under the initial target. It was performed over a four-hour period over a single weekend. The production storage successfully switched to Nutanix Files with zero user impact. To migrate the existing 100TB on application and user data from Windows File Servers to Nutanix Files, Nutanix advised to use Atempo Miria for a fast and seamless migration.

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The Result?

The non-negotiable project benchmarks were that it should be invisible to users and rapidly executed. GVB were keen to switch to Nutanix Files to benefit from its scalability and its rich security and analytics features. Without a professional migration solution, Henk is convinced that a manual migration or the use of free tools would not have met the same level of success. Atempo and Nutanix formed a winning partnership to bring the results GVB needed.