HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA - As Microsoft-centric enterprises plot their upgrades from NT 4.0 servers to Windows 2000 machines and try to figure out Active Directory, they better not lose sight of the effort it will take to accomplish two related tasks: migrating data from the old environment to the new one and consolidating servers.
Data migration and server consolidation, while not as high profile as operating system or directory upgrades, can be time-consuming and tedious tasks. The efforts are typically punctuated by hours of hands-on administration, such as recreating network shares and their associated permissions.
To address the challenges, FastLane Technologies released DM/Consolidator last week. DM/Consolidator works with migrations and consolidations between NT 4.0 servers, between NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, and between Windows 2000 servers. One of DM/Consolidator's highlights is that enterprise data never has to be taken offline during migrations.
Microsoft used the tool when it converted its Redmond, Wash., campus infrastructure from NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 earlier this year. The company saved some 90 hours of hands-on work on each of the 1,300 servers it upgraded, according to data Microsoft provided to FastLane.
DM/Consolidator's other main attraction is that it preserves directory and file permissions as well as access control lists even as data is moved across server partitions, domains and directory structures. DM/Consolidator also transfers local groups between servers and retains permissions for those groups. In addition, the product leaves network shares and their permissions intact even as data is moved between servers.
"With DM/Consolidator, we now can have less-skilled administrators do data migration with high levels of success instead of using senior staff for the job," says Greg Speer, NT project manager for Texas Instruments in Dallas.
For Logicon, a division of Northrop Grumman, DM/Consolidator helped ease the migration of its logon scripts from a server in California to one in New York.
"We didn't move a large amount of data, but recreating 30 to 35 shares and setting permissions on those logon scripts would have been a time-consuming task," says John Rotherman, a systems integrator for Logicon Internal Information Services in Hawthorne, Calif. "We would have had to research our permissions on each share and then recreate them by hand on the new server."
Rotherman says users were never affected by the change. He also plans to use the tool to consolidate NT servers onto Windows 2000 servers.
But server consolidation may not be the tool's strong suit.
"I don't think this tool will be big for consolidation because there is a limit to the amount of consolidation you can do on NT," says John Enck, an analyst with Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn. "But data migration is key because servers are always being moved or new ones are being brought in. This is a great tool for that."
DM/Consolidator also allows network administrators to schedule migrations, migrate data in stages and do it all from a single console.
DM/Consolidator is expected to ship in mid-November and is priced at $2,000 per server.
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