Carbonite Migrate for Actian Zen/PSQL Migrations

Get our Carbonite Migrate data sheet here.
Get more details from the Carbonite web site.

Are you working on a migration project? Server migrations can be one of the most stressful operations for an IT staff to complete. It doesn't matter whether you are moving to a new physical server, a virtual server, a new operating system, a new database engine version, or a new storage system -- the risks involved can be quite unnerving, and one little mistake can ruin your entire weekend!

The problem with most migrations is that you are taking an application environment which works perfectly fine and making wholesale changes to the underlying environment. How do you know the new environment is really configured correctly for the application? How do you know if you will have the right performance in the target environment before actually swapping over? How can you manage the downtime involved when you need to copy over many GBs or TBs of data at a time when nobody is using the system, which usually means late nights on a weekend?

Luckily, there is a solution. The Carbonite Migrate product (formerly known as Carbonite Move) is designed to aid in a migration from any source environment to any target environment. This includes:

• Migration to a new physical server
• Migration to a new virtual server
• Migration to a new cloud server
• Migrating to a new operating system version
• Migrating to a new storage system (SAN) or disk volume
• Migrating to a new version of the PSQL database engine
• Migrating to a new version of your application

Yes, whether you are doing a complete server migration or just migrating the data for your application to a new platform, Carbonite Migrate can handle all of these situations with ease. With a quick and easy setup (usually less than an hour), you can get Migrate working to mirror your source data to the target environment, all while users are still using the production system. When the mirror is complete, continuous replication technology ensures that the data is complete. There is NO downtime needed to copy the files over, because the data is moved disk block by disk block. Once the mirroring is complete, replication technology ensures that changes made to the source disks are also made to the target disks, in the exact order in which they occur. This makes it safe for PSQL databases, too!

Once a copy of the data is on the new environment, you will probably want to do some testing. You can easily pause the replication process and fire up the application on the target server and run the same application to ensure that everything is working properly. You can even load up a bunch of users for performance testing. If your environment is very complicated, you can even rely on Migrate to make wholesale changes to the target server, bringing in the server name, IP address, and other attributes from the source server to enable full-scale testing.

Once testing has shown that the environment is working, you re-enable the replication from the source environment to the target. In short order, the recent changes on the source server are mirrored to the target, and the data is once again in sync between the two systems and changes are replicated continuously from that point forward.

That takes us to the scary moment of the cut-over to the new system -- a time that all system administrators dread! The old way of doing this was pretty simple: you locked users out and shut down the old environment, waited hours for the final data copy to complete, then started up the new environment and tried to remember what changes you had to make to the environment (server name, IP address, config files, etc.) to get it to work. The typical cost is an entire Saturday night and a whole bunch of stress in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Worse still, if something doesn't work, you might have to copy all of the data back to the source server (another few hours lost) and move everyone back to the old environment.

With Migrate, though, this process is far simplified. Since the source server is constantly replicating the data to the target server, the target server will usually be only seconds behind the source, if even that. When you get the last user out of the source server and shut down, the final bytes that were changed are transferred to the target server immediately. Because there is no "final copy", the data is immediately ready to go on the target server, and you can immediately start up the new environment for post cut-over testing, saving hours of your Saturday night. Environmental changes such as server name and IP address are handled automatically by Migrate. If you figured out what needed to be changed for the new environment and added scripts to Migrate, then it can even make most of the application-level configuration changes, too! Total downtime? Less than 10 minutes,and you get to go home to your family!

There are three two different editions of Migrate, known as Basic, Standard and Premium. Here's what you need to know about picking the right edition. (Note: As of October 2022, OpenText has discontinued the Basic license. We do not know if this is a permanent change or if they will bring it back, so we are leaving the data here for reference.)

Once you try Carbonite Migrate, you'll never want to do a migration the old-fashioned way again. The current version of Migrate (v8.5) requires Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer. However, if you have an older operating system like Windows Server 2003 or 2008, we can still get you the older Migrate/Move release (v7.x). For a complete list, check out our own list of supported operating systems.

Migrate licenses are node-locked to a single server, so if you are migrating 10 servers, you'll need 10 licenses. Licenses are valid for a limited migration period, depending on the edition you have selected. If your migration is taking longer, then you can purchase a second license and add that to the server and continue your migration job -- no reinstallation needed.

Do you have additional questions or want to see a demonstration? Your best bet is to contact Goldstar Software directly, and we can discuss your specific needs and make your next migration as stress-free as possible.

Still scared about all of this, but you need to get some migrations completed as soon as possible? Carbonite also has a Migrate as a Service (MaaS) option that might just be perfect for you! You can trust the professionals at Carbonite to handle all of your migration needs, all at a fixed price per server. Pricing is dependent on the number of migrations needed, whether you want to do test migrations, and whether clustering is involved, and so forth, so if this appeals to you, please contact us for additional information.

Do you already know what you need and just want to buy Carbonite Migrate now? You can get it on-line right now from our web storefront!