Migrating Data From HPE 3PAR to Nimble Storage using HPE RMC PeerCopy

I’ve had a few comments on my blog (as well as other forums both HPE & independent) where customers are looking for options & ideas to migrate their critical datasets from their HPE 3PAR systems to a new Nimble Storage platform.

If you’re a virtualised environment (and I would bet that almost 100% of all readers are virtualised to some degree) the easiest and most simplest way to migrate data is using VMware vMotion or Hyper-V LiveMigration. These tools are storage platform agnostic, and will move your VMs & data non-disruptively from one array to another.

However – this doesn’t help you for OTHER types of data that do not reside in a virtual machine format. You may have in-guest iSCSI for application-quiesed snaps & backups. You may have physical servers dedicated for certain high-performance applications. You may be using RDMs for certain design reasons.

All of these usecases do not allow you to easily migrate your data using vMotion/Live Migration – and thus you will need to use other tools in order to help you move your data.

The good news: you can use HPE Recovery Manager Central (RMC) to facilitate this data migration for you!

HPE RMC is a tool that you may not be too familiar with – it’s quite possibly one of the best kept secrets in the HPE portfolio.

RMC is a suite of tools installed as a virtual machine (image available for VMware and Hyper-V) and allows users to consume cross-HPE orchestration of application/VM consistent snapshots, clones, replication and restores of datasets that are residing on 3PAR, Nimble/dHCI and Primera platforms.

Furthermore, RMC can move those copies of data to HPE’s StoreOnce on-premises – as well as backing data up to HPE Cloud Volumes Backup for cloud-based backup & recovery in the Public Cloud.

What’s more – RMC is FREE for all 3PAR and Nimble customers – and can be downloaded from Infosight Software Downloads for Nimble users.

A feature inside of RMC is PeerCopy; which is a clever piece of tech that allows you to copy data using array based snapshots and snap-diff from one HPE-based storage array to another – which can be the same or completely disparate from one another.

This therefore becomes a great tool for you to be able to harness for copying & moving data from your old 3PAR platform to your new Nimble Storage 🙂

So here you go – here is a video demo showcasing HPE RMC PeerCopy, and migrating data from old to new!

Whilst this video shows a standard Nimble system, you absolutely CAN do the same workflows and data mobility using Nimble dHCI platforms too!

Here’s another demo – this time focusing on migrating SQL Server datasets from 3PAR to Nimble

And finally – a demo on migrating SAP HANA from 3PAR to Nimble:

If you would like more technical details on RMC PeerCopy, my colleague Pete Wightman has written a pretty detailed blog post here.

I hope this blog & video demos were useful to you. We’re working on other tools & cool tech to help you move and harness your data across the HPE storage portfolio – stay tuned for more news as I get it!

Cheers… and Stay Nimble 😉

Nick