EMC Adds Services To Migration Push
In January, EMC announced free software and reduced maintenance fees to customers that switch to EMC's Legato and Dantz storage management and backup software. Now the storage heavyweight is offering its SafeSwitch migration services to ease the effort, said Kelly Polanski, vice president of product marketing at EMC.
Solution providers can either resell the service, or handle the migrations themselves, said Polanski. Of the 159 migrations done in the past several months, about two-thirds involved a solution provider, she said.
It takes two days to complete the migration effort, Polanski said. The first day involves extracting customers' archival metadata, enabling EMC software to take over storage management. On the second day, EMC or its partners train customers on how to manage the archive and work with the legacy data.
According to Polanski, companies typically must maintain the legacy applications that generated their data, in case they need to access that information.
"With SafeSwitch, in the end, the legacy backup application is not needed," she said. "Customers can throw it in the trash."