Unstructured data migration vendor Datadobi now offers complete packages for migrating business data that combine its DobiMigrate software, installation, initial migration and follow-up support services to help make it easier for businesses of all sizes to move their data where it is needed.

The NAS migration capabilities now are available in “starter packs” that include all the needed ingredients for a successful, easier and secure data migration project between any NAS platform, regardless of size or complexity, according to the company. The DobiMigrate Starter Packs are available in three sizes — the SMB package for up to 50TB of data, the commercial package for up to 200TB of data, and the enterprise package for up to 500TB of data.

Datadobi’s Michael Jack

“In a nutshell, our product is built from the ground up to handle the complexity and size of today’s enterprise migration challenges,” Michael Jack, Datadobi’s co-founder and vice president of global sales, told Channel Futures. “The primary use case is when a company wants to change its NAS storage type. This is typically across vendors but can also be between different storage platforms of the same vendor.”

Using the starter packs, a customer can install the software and perform the migrations using a core that is the orchestrator of the migration and related proxies which perform the actual copying of the data and metadata, said Jack.

“A cross-platform or cross-vendor migration is the most complex kind of NAS migration because of the different ways that each vendor interprets the different NAS protocols and because of the thousands of different ways that customers can configure their NAS,” he said. “This complexity increases exponentially as the amount of data and number of files increases.”

For partners, the new migration starter kits give their customers a great experience when they sell them storage, Jack said.

“It’s easy to use, it’s easy to attach and it increases their margins on a storage sale. Before Datadobi data migration, they could offer migration services but it was with outdated tools or they would be forced to leave the customer to handle the migration themselves with often very unpredictable results,” he added.

Datadobi was founded in 2010 but is relatively new to the channel.

“We have primarily focused on doing business with and through the storage vendors and we’ve only been working the channel for about two-and-a-half years,” said Jack.

So far the company has been doing business with about 110 global channel partners, including about a dozen ISVs, six systems integrators and a wide assortment of VARs and major storage vendors. The starter packs were created based on requests from many of those partners. The packs allow users to migrate their data between NAS storage, the cloud and a wide range of other storage systems.

“It was the channel that asked us to create this because, although we’ve been selling through the channel for the last couple of years, they asked for something that is packaged better and more conducive to an onward sell,” said Jack. “The different sizes of the starter packs allow customers to have …

… the flexibility in their migration projects and gives them more value for money the bigger the starter pack that they buy.”

By offering new packaging, the data storage-management starter packs will help channel partners make sure that their customers are able to transition from old storage to new storage, quickly, with the best ROI, while keeping their data secure, said Jack.

Charles Bass, vice president of business development for Lifeboat Distribution, one of Datadobi’s partners, said the starter packs are a game-changer for partners because they simplify enterprise NAS migration scenarios for customers.

“Resellers now have the ability to capture some of the growing data migration market and have a trusted partner like Datadobi behind them to grow that business,” said Bass.

Charles King, an IT analyst with Pund-IT, said that tools like Datadobi’s starter packs should offer significant benefits to customers and to channel partners that sell and service them.

Pund-IT’s Charles King

“Migrating from one NAS platform to another is such a common occurrence that it might qualify as a fact of life for a business’ IT staff,” said King. “Though such migrations can be lengthy, trying and complex, enterprises have long had access to tools that make the process faster and easier. The company’s new starter packs are designed to make its solutions available to companies of virtually every size, which should prove invaluable to companies and the partners they trust for storage services.”

Another analyst, Greg Schulz, principal analyst of StorageIO, said the new starter packs will make data migration easier for companies that will appreciate the simplified graphical user interfaces used in Datadobi’s packages. For partners, the starter packs will be especially appreciated, he said.

“This should be a home run for a channel partner or even an MSP,” said Schulz. “Services like these should be low hanging fruit where they can sell a service and wrap some consulting services around it.”