Centera Services and Customer Challenges

Centera is not dead but no major engineering development has occurred since 2010. End of Life has not been announced by DELL EMC and there are various alternatives from DELL EMC as a compatible replacement, customers are looking for alternatives from other Vendors. Centera customers need to be thinking now about how to extend the life of their Centera’s or in fact how to get the data migrated to another platform. No one should underestimate the complexity of migrating data from Centera to an alternative platform.

Many companies use many different types of applications to manage and run their business to provide compliant regulated management for both Internal and for legal reasons. If companies are looking to move off DELL EMC’s Centera going forward then we help customers define what the best platform is for the right application, and in many cases to move to a nonproprietary Platform with lock down capability.

Key Challenges

  • Reporting on Centera’s is limited to hardware reporting and manual processes to deliver reports, as well as migrations which can be reasonably complex and time consuming.
  • Migrating applications that are integrated with the Centera API is complicated because of the proprietary nature of the API.
  • The migration complexity increases dramatically for Companies with multiple applications stored on Centera, each with its own integration methods.
  • Extensive professional services may be required to migrate from Centera to other storage platforms, increasing costs substantially.
  • Using ECS content addressable storage (CAS) interface preserves Centera’s proprietary storage methods but full compatibility does not exist and this simply moves the migration problem into the future.
  • Migrating to a NAS device requires the data to be transformed to a different format during the migration and for the application data base to be updated to reflect the new location.

LifecycleStor Centera Services

  • Firstly, we can extend the supported life of customers Centera’s even beyond the End of Service Life from DELL EMC to give you breathing space to plan a migration.
  • Use our data Assessment Services to help you determine the volumes of data and the applications that have stored the data. We can also determine that all the retention settings are compliant and in line with the applications requirements.
  • We can check that your Centera’s are in sync and that no data corruption exists.
  • Use our secure data erasure service to delete data that is still stored but has passed the retention period.
  • We provide a high level consultancy service to help you plan a migration which is heavily dependent upon the application and the target platform.
  • We can erase the data from old nodes and reformat them for re use in production environments.
  • Detailed reporting through our Centera Reporting as a Service (CRaaS) is invaluable when looking to remain compliant and ensure that your data is in sync.
  • The combination of detailed reporting around Centera meta data and extending the life of the Platform provides peace of mind whilst deciding on a new target to migrate too.