Over the last couple of months I’ve been busy phasing out an old EMC CLARiiON CX3 system and migrating all the data to either newer VNX and/or Isilon systems. The hard work paid off: the CX3 is now empty and we can start to decommission it. But before we ship it back to EMC we need to employ a type of CLARiiON data erasure to make sure data doesn’t fall into wrong hands.
Update 2019-01: You can also use these commands on a VNX. I’ve updated the post with several additional screenshots and fixed a few typo’s.
When migrating servers from one storage system to another there are basically two options: Migrate using storage features like SAN Copy or MirrorView, or migrate using server based tools like PowerPath Migration Enabler Host Copy, VMware Storage VMotion or Robo Copy. Which option you choose depends on a lot of factors, including the environment you’re in, the amount of downtime you can afford, the amount of data, etc. I’ve grown especially fond of PowerPath Migration Enabler due to its ease of use. You can throttle its migration speed, your “old” data is left intact (so you’ve got a fallback) and once you’ve gotten use to the commands it’s child’s play to migrate non-disruptively and quickly.