In this Technology Validation, Taneja Group examines the time and effort surrounding manual data migration, compared to data migration with Incipient software. In the course of their analysis, they performed a manual data migration and a transparent, nondisruptive data migration using Incipient software and evaluated the potential costs of both approaches over time.

Incipient software consists of two main components; storage virtualization and data migration software that operate on Cisco MDS 9000 Fibre Channel Storage Services Modules (SSM), and Storage Administrator software for configuration, policy and management that operates on a separate server. Incipient software delivers complete control path and data path management of SAN volumes within the Cisco MDS 9000 director class SAN switches, requiring no on-line resources outside the Cisco MDS 9000 switch other than an allocated fabric attached storage LUN to maintain persistent volume metadata.