Data Management Glossary
SMB Data Migration
SMB protocol data migration refers to the process of transferring data stored in SMB protocol-based systems, such as Windows file servers, to another system, such as a new file server or a cloud-based storage service. The SMB (Server Message Block) protocol is a network file sharing protocol used by Windows-based systems to access files and other resources on a server over a network.
Like any file data migration, an SMB data migration involves several steps, such as data extraction, data transformation, data loading, data verification, and data archiving. The goal of an SMB data migration is to ensure that all data accurately and securely transfers to the new system, while minimizing any disruptions to business operations and preserving the integrity of the data.
SMB protocol data migration can be challenging due to the complex nature of the SMB protocol and the large volumes of data that are often involved. To ensure a successful migration, organizations typically use specialized tools and services, such as data migration software, cloud data migration services, and managed data migration services.
The Barriers to Fast SMB Migrations
From the Hypertransfer white paper:
Unstructured data is everywhere. From genomics and medical imaging to streaming video, electric cars, and IoT products, all sectors generate unstructured file data. Data-heavy enterprises typically have petabytes of file data, which can consist of billions of files scattered across different storage vendors, architectures and locations. And while file data growth is exploding, IT budgets are not. That’s why enterprises’ IT organizations are looking to migrate file workloads to the cloud. However, they face many barriers, which can cause migrations to take weeks to months and require significant manual effort. These include:
- Billions of files, mostly small: Unstructured data migrations often require moving billions of files, the vast majority of which are small files that have tremendous overhead, causing data transfers to be slow.
- Chatty protocols: Server message block (SMB) protocol workloads—which can be user data, electronic design automation (EDA) and other multimedia files or corporate shares—are often a challenge since the protocol requires many back-and-forth handshakes which increase traffic over the network.
- Large WAN latency: Network file protocols are extremely sensitive to high-latency network connections, which are essentially unavoidable in wide area network (WAN) migrations.
- Limited network bandwidth: Bandwidth is often limited or not always available, causing data transfers to become slow, unreliable and difficult to manage.
Speed up SMB Migration with Hypertransfer
Blocks and Files coverage: Komprise speeds SMB data migration to cloud
Hypertransfer for Komprise Elastic Data Migration delivers 25x performance gains compared to other tools. Komprise Elastic Data Migration is a SaaS solution available with the Komprise Intelligent Data Management platform or standalone. Designed to be fast, easy and reliable with elastic scale-out parallelism and an analytics-driven approach, it is the market leader in file and object data migrations, routinely migrating petabytes of data (SMB, NFS, Dual) for customers in many complex scenarios. Komprise Elastic Data Migration ensures data integrity is fully preserved by propagating access control and maintaining file-level data integrity checks such as SHA-1 and MD5 checks with audit logging.
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