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This version of the software is currently available only to customers in the Controlled Availability (CA) program.

Approaches to data migration

When performing a parallel environment upgrade, keep the cutover outage time as short as possible. Typically, the bulk of the data is migrated to the parallel environment prior to the cutover outage. During the outage, an incremental or delta data migration is performed that migrates only the data changed since the last data migration between the two systems. In this scenario, the target system has its data fully protected; no users are on the system; and all scheduled processes that can alter data are turned off. Therefore, changes only take place on the source system.

This approach is not feasible for a consolidation migration where the source and target systems are in production usage. Data is being changed in both locations. Even if target system users cannot access the data being migrated into the system, the target BMC Helix ITSM system still performs scheduled actions. For example, SLAs will timeout for incidents that have been migrated but have no one to work on them, and duplicate notifications will be sent to end users.

Therefore, there are two options for a consolidation cutover data migration:

  • Migrate all data—Migrate all data in a single operation during the cutover. The feasibility of this approach depends on the data volumes, allowable outage duration, and complexity/duration of the other cutover operations.
  • Migrate live data only—Prior to the cutover, as much data as possible is migrated into the target system, with the aim of reducing the data volumes that need to be migrated during the cutover. However, none of the "live" data that scheduled operations can affect is migrated from the source system prior to the cutover. Only live transactional data or configuration data that is not under change control is migrated from the source during the cutover.

If non-live data (such as closed incidents) are reopened in the source system, the data migration process is not affect because this data is live only in the source system. BMC Helix Data Manager safely replicates the reopened incident to the target system.

Any migration of data to the target system prior to the cutover requires a clearly defined data change management policy to be enforced. For more details, see Change-management-when-consolidating-systems.

 

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BMC Helix Data Manager 21.3