Data Management Glossary
Data Migration
What is Data Migration?
Data migration is the process of moving data from one storage system, location, or format to another. It occurs when IT teams are moving to new storage hardware, consolidating vendors, migrating workloads to the cloud or a co-location center, or modernizing infrastructure for cost, performance, security, or AI readiness.
Data migrations often occur in the context of retiring a system and moving to a new system, or in the context of a cloud migration, or in the context of a modernization or upgrade strategy. The term data migration means many different things and there are many types of data migrations in the enterprise world. For this Glossary, we’re focused on Unstructured Data Migration, specifically file and object data. IT organizations use data migration tools to move data across different data storage systems and across different formats and protocols (SMB, NFS, S3, etc.).
When it comes to unstructured data migrations and migrating enterprise file data workloads to the cloud, data migrations can be laborious, error prone, manual, and time consuming. Migrating data may involve finding and moving billions of files (large and small), which can succumb to storage and network slowdowns or outages. Also, different file systems do not often preserve metadata in exactly the same way, so migrating data to a cloud environment without loss of fidelity and integrity can be a challenge.
Two Data Migration Approaches
Lift-and-Shift
Many organizations start here, thinking they’ll just migrate entire file shares and directories to the cloud. If this is your data migration plan, it’s important to use analytics to plan and migrate to reduce errors, ensure alignment and multi-storage visibility while minimizing cutover. With Komprise Elastic Data Migration, you can readily migrate from one primary vendor to another without rehydrating all the archived data, so migrations are cheaper and faster.
Cloud Data Tiering as a First Step: Smart Data Migration
Since a large percentage of file data is cold and has not been used in a year or more, tiering and archiving cold data is a smart first step – especially if you use Transparent Move Technology so users can access the files exactly as before. You can follow this up by migrating the remaining hot data to a performance cloud tier.
Questions to Answer for Migrating
Here are some questions that will help you determine the best file and object data migration strategy:
- What data storage do we have and where? (primary storage, secondary storage)
- What data sets are accessed most frequently (hot) and less frequently (cold)?
- What types of data and files do we have and which are taking up the most storage (image files, video, audio files, sensor data, etc.)?
- What is the cost of storing these different file types today? How does this align with the budget and projected growth?
- Which types of files should be stored at a higher security level? (PII or IP data? Mission-critical projects?)
- Are we complying with regulations and internal policies with our unstructured data management practices?
- What constraints do my network and environment pose and how do I avoid surprises during migrations?
- Do we have the best possible strategy in place for WAN acceleration, such as Komprise Hypertransfer for Elastic Data Migration.
Data Migration FAQs
What makes unstructured data migration uniquely challenging?
Unstructured data migration is particularly challenging because file and object environments can contain billions of individual files with varying sizes, metadata dependencies, permission structures, and application relationships. Unlike database migrations, which follow defined schemas, unstructured data migrations must preserve file attributes, timestamps, ACLs, and directory structures across heterogeneous source and destination environments. Tools like rsync and robocopy are free but error-prone, do not handle failures well, and require significant manual effort and oversight. Cloud gateways hold data in proprietary formats and do not put organizations on a sound path to long-term cloud data management. At petabyte scale, unexpected costs, slow transfer speeds, and governance gaps are the most common failure modes — all of which Komprise Elastic Data Migration is designed to eliminate.
How does Komprise Elastic Data Migration work and what makes it different from point tools like rsync, robocopy, and AWS DataSync?
Komprise Elastic Data Migration is an analytics-driven, any-to-any migration platform proven at 100PB and above that eliminates the manual overhead, network surprises, and governance gaps that plague point tool migrations. It supports NAS to NAS, NAS to cloud, and cloud to cloud migrations across any NFS, SMB, dual-mode, mixed-mode, and S3 or object environment. Before migration begins, Komprise Analysis performs an ACE assessment that analyzes both the data and the network topology together, identifying what to migrate, to where, at what cost, and where network bottlenecks will occur, before a single file moves. During migration, Komprise Hypertransfer eliminates WAN bottlenecks and chatty protocol overhead to deliver migrations up to 27x faster than standard SMB, NFS, and S3 transfer methods. Full fidelity and chain of custody are maintained with MD5 checksums and file-level reporting for regulated industries. Migration jobs can be scheduled and orchestrated via UI or API with auto-parallelism and scale-out that adapts to the environment without manual tuning.
| Capability | Point Tools (rsync, robocopy, DataSync) | Komprise Elastic Data Migration |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-migration analysis | None | ACE assesses data and network together |
| Transfer speed | Standard protocol speed | Up to 27x faster with Hypertransfer |
| WAN optimization | None | Patented Hypertransfer eliminates bottlenecks |
| Multi-vendor NAS support | Limited | Any NFS, SMB, dual-mode, S3, object |
| Any-to-any migration | No | Yes, full source and destination flexibility |
| Metadata and ACL preservation | Partial, error-prone | Full fidelity guaranteed |
| Chain of custody reporting | No | MD5 checksums, file-level reporting |
| Failure handling | Manual intervention required | Automated error handling and retry |
| Cold data right-placement | No | Tiers cold data during migration |
| API and UI scheduling | No | Full UI and API-driven orchestration |
| Scale to 100PB+ | No | Proven at 100PB and above |
| Ongoing data lifecycle | None | Hands off to Komprise Intelligent Tiering |
What is Smart Data Migration and how does it reduce migration scope and storage costs?
Most enterprises approach data migration as a lift-and-shift exercise, moving everything from source to destination regardless of whether it needs to be there. A Smart Data Migration takes an analytics-first approach that changes this fundamentally. Komprise Analysis assesses both the data and the network before migration begins, identifying data volumes, file types, access patterns, cold versus hot data distribution, and network topology together so IT teams know exactly what to migrate, where it should go, and what it will cost before any data moves. Cold data identified in the ACE assessment is tiered directly to lower-cost cloud or object storage during migration rather than being moved to expensive primary storage at the destination. Only active, hot data that needs fast access is migrated to primary storage at the new destination. This right-placement approach typically saves 70% or more on destination storage costs compared to a traditional lift-and-shift migration. After migration is complete, Komprise Intelligent Tiering continues managing the data lifecycle on an ongoing basis, automatically moving newly cold data off primary storage without requiring another migration project. The result is a destination environment that starts optimized rather than inheriting years of data sprawl from the source.
How does data migration support AI readiness for enterprise unstructured data?
Many enterprises are discovering that their unstructured data is fragmented across legacy NAS systems, disconnected file shares, and aging object storage environments that cannot easily connect to modern AI platforms. Migrating this data to a unified, cloud-connected storage environment is often a prerequisite for building AI data pipelines. Komprise Elastic Data Migration moves file and object data from any source to any cloud or object storage destination in native format, preserving full metadata and directory structure. Once migrated, data is indexed in the Global Metadatabase and immediately available for Deep Analytics and Komprise Smart Data Workflows that can curate and deliver it to AI platforms. Migration becomes the foundation for AI readiness rather than just an infrastructure exercise, and because data is always stored in native format, it is immediately usable by AI models and analytics platforms without format conversion or rehydration.
How does Komprise handle NAS migrations at petabyte scale without disrupting users or applications?
At petabyte scale, migrations that require downtime or user disruption are not viable for most enterprises. Komprise Elastic Data Migration is designed specifically for large-scale, complex environments and has been proven at 100PB and above. Auto-parallelism and scale-out adapt automatically to the environment without manual tuning, and Komprise Hypertransfer handles challenging scenarios including small files, choppy WAN connections, and thousands of shares that cause point tools to slow dramatically or fail. Users continue accessing data throughout the migration with no disruption to applications or workflows. Full fidelity is verified with MD5 checksums at the file level, and chain of custody reporting satisfies requirements for regulated industries. Migration jobs can be scheduled and managed via UI or API, giving IT teams full control and visibility without the manual babysitting that rsync and robocopy require.