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According to Mergermarket, deal makers are anticipating a “Trump bump” — a surge in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) following Donald Trump’s election as president. Should this happen, an increasing amount of data will need to be moved from its current storage into acquiring companies' environments over the next few years.
It’s a big ask. M&A activity is vital for innovation, so integrating people, systems, and data quickly and seamlessly is incredibly important to allow the merged entities to achieve the outcomes they’re aiming for.
However, data migrations put a very heavy load onto the shoulders of IT teams, who still need to keep the operational wheels turning. Migrations are complex, they take a very long time to complete, and they can go badly wrong. There’s a risk of losing data in the transfer, especially if the data is actively being edited. There’s extra risk when ingesting data generated within another company’s environment, as lack of visibility inevitably means uncertainty around what’s in that data.
Moving data at scale takes time
Data migration or ingestion tends to be the long pole in the tent for any acquisition integration project. Most migrations are a 3-step process, each step is lengthy, and historically, each one needs to be done serially.
- Architect: Design the target infrastructure and data storage strategy.
- Build: Deploy the target infrastructure and configuring the data migration tools.
- Migrate: Transfer data from the source to the target system.
With most migration tools, data can only begin moving once planning, architecting, and building are complete. As a result, most IT teams have no way to expedite the process, leaving them with migration projects that take months longer than they would if the data could start to move earlier.
The challenge is that most tools require the target environment to be architected and built before the first byte of data transfer gets underway. There’s no good reason for this — it’s simply driven by the limitations of the tools, which are only capable of a one-step migration; where they move the data to is where it’s going to stay. That means the final resting place for the data must exist before the transfer starts.
There is a better, faster way.
Panzura has been wildly successful across small, medium and large enterprise customers with the CloudFS hybrid cloud file platform, which enables Windows file share and NAS consolidation, global data distribution, and real-time collaboration between sites as well as substantially improved storage efficiencies and powerful data resilience. CloudFS is frequently used for cloud migrations as well as file-to-object store migrations, making the file data immutable, adding a sub-60 second recovery point objective by way of immutable global snapshots, and enabling global file distribution.
These hybrid cloud capabilities empower organizations to control data proliferation and costs, gain resilience for both data and data infrastructure, and dramatically boost organizational productivity through immediate data delivery.
Our recent release of Panzura Symphony, a data services platform with extensive data management and mobilization capabilities, has enabled another layer of accelerated data and storage migrations, regardless of where the data is moving from or to.
Panzura Symphony incorporates and expands on the technology of Moonwalk Universal, acquired by Panzura in early 2024. Symphony’s capabilities include information lifecycle management, data pipelines, data classification, charge back features, and automated data movement orchestration, among many others.
The platform is uniquely capable of seamless, metadata-aware data migrations at up to three times the speed of other migration tools, as well as enabling the data to move much earlier in the project planning process. It’s this metadata awareness that lets IT teams approach migrations differently. With most migrations, all of the storage decisions need to be made and executed before starting the migration.
With Symphony, the data can begin to move as soon as there is a file system or object store target with available disk space. Later, the intelligence contained in the metadata can be used to shift all or part of the data, based on its characteristics, to its final location.
Let’s say the acquired company is all on-premises and the acquirer has a hybrid-cloud environment. In this example, the IT team can simply bring up a cloud object store in the same cloud region where they plan to build out the infrastructure and start the data migration.
Symphony will convert the files to objects as well as keep all the relevant metadata, including access permission lists. The team can even add metadata attributes during the move to make the data more searchable.
While the architecture and design are underway, the data is already moving into the cloud bucket. Once the build is completed, the objects can be migrated back to files into their final resting place, with no egress fees. Or, some of the data can stay as searchable objects resting on inexpensive storage, for completed project, compliance or just archive purposes.
As data is in flight, it may also be changing in real time. After all, the company doesn’t stop working because it has been acquired. With Symphony, that’s expected and data integrity is assured. Deltas — data changes — are captured within the metadata, so will also move to the destination object store when they happen.
Symphony’s data transfer acceleration techniques don’t stop there. Its unique and patented disintermediated architecture has none of the latency- and processing-prone bottlenecks that other migration tools include, which throttle data movement.
Migrations don’t need to be as difficult or as slow, as they currently are. With ever-increasing data volumes as well as increased M&A activity, organizations cannot afford the time it currently takes to move large volumes of data, or the effort it takes from their IT teams.
Panzura Symphony provides highly efficient, accelerated data migrations, no matter the reason for moving data. Its precise approach to data placement, coupled with disintermediated architecture that streamlines the data movement process, cost-effectively reduces the time and complexity associated with data migration projects.
To learn more about how Symphony can revolutionize your post-acquisition data migration, download the solution brief.
