Best Way to copy 10TB of Data

[jdell]

We are trying to copy 10tb of data from various old servers to a new SAN, we need to do this as quick as possible.

 

What is the best way.

 

Thanks

[featured_spectre]

it depends on your circumstances...what do you have by way of infrastructure?

[jdell]

We have a LAN which will be limited by the speed of the servers 6 which are only 100 Meg connected. The SAN is on a iscsi network with the VM Hosts. What else do you need?

[zag]

Copying direct over the network is probably the quickest.

 

Anything else will be a bit of a faff

 

Maybe move the servers onto a single Gigabit switch temporarily

[localzuk]

Copying over the network would probably be the slowest route in my experience, so I'd say something like get a USB 3 card and swap it in to each server you want to get data off of, then plug a USB 3 external hard drive in and copy the data off etc...

 

However, you'll then need some way to get from USB3 to your SAN.

 

100Mbit network for servers is incredibly slow! Copying 10TB of data over a 100Mbit connection would equal a minimum of 256 hours copy time!

 

Another option, if your servers have 1Gbit ports, is to use a crossover cable between the old and new device and do a direct copy at 1Gbit.

 

I copied around 6TB of data from an old server to a NAS a while ago for a project. It was at 1Gbit speeds, and took basically an entire weekend.

Edited January 20, 2014 by localzuk

[AJWhite1970]

On a pure software basis I would recommend using Fastcopy FastCopy

 

I use it to do all my server -> disk backups each night and nothing else I have tested comes close for speed.

 

I agree with the others though, it will only be as fast as the slowest bit of your LAN you use to do the copy...

 

Andrew