IT solutions distributor Computrade Technology Malaysia recently used Carbonite Move Powered by DoubleTake to migrate more than 2TB of Linux- and Windows-based data from one Alibaba Cloud data center to another.

Computrade, a Carbonite Partner, followed up the impressive workload migration with a second migration. This time, the company used Carbonite Move to migrate more than 500GB of data from onsite servers into the Alibaba Cloud in Malaysia, according to Kenneth Devan, vice president and technical consultant with the company.

Due to strict regulatory compliance mandates, financial institutions and other businesses in Malaysia remain reluctant to embrace public cloud providers that do not have data centers located inside the country, Devan explained.

“When we talk about moving data to the cloud, clients always ask a simple question: Where is the nearest data center?” said Devan. “Alibaba is one of the first cloud providers to set up a data center in Malaysia, so it’s very important to the Malaysian market.”

A Successful Migration

Computrade began the migration process by collecting data. The company used both structured and unstructured data provided by local clients, as well as business and employee data housed in its own servers. 

“We wanted to show that we could do a big data migration across Alibaba Cloud, and some of our clients were willing to help,” Devan said.

Computrade and the Carbonite support team used Carbonite Move to carry out the 2TB migration. They moved a virtual Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2-based data center from an Alibaba Cloud data center located in Hong Kong to an Alibaba Cloud data center located in Singapore. The team went on to successfully complete the same migration with Cent OS 7.3 Linux-based data. 

“Using the Linux environment can be complex, but Computrade Malaysia made it happen,” Devan said. “After that, we took an existing local customer with approximately 500GB of development data and migrated it from onsite servers to the Alibaba Malaysia data center.”

Migration Challenges Overcome

IT teams need stable connectivity when migrating data to and between clouds. Without it, glitches are certain to arise. That’s why the Computrade Malaysia team tested several methods, including site-to-site, VPN tunneling, and authentication methods such as IPsec and GRE tunneling.

Security solutions like intrusion prevention systems (IPS) can also pose migration challenges.

“Each organization has various types of protection, from IPS to firewall protection,” Devan said. “This can be a hindrance, but we identified all of these matters and simplified the process to ensure connectivity to the cloud.”

Why Carbonite Move?

Computrade has been a distributor of Carbonite Move since 2013. Devan and his team chose to offer the workload migration solution because it’s relatively easy to use, it offers broad platform support, and it enables customers to reliably migrate data from one cloud provider to another, such as from Oracle Cloud to Microsoft Azure.

Computrade is currently co-bundling Carbonite Move with Oracle Database. But while Oracle and other large software vendors offer their own data migration tools, Devan said his clients prefer Carbonite Move.

“Many cloud providers have their own replication and migration tools, but the simplicity just isn’t there,” he said. “But with Carbonite Move we can easily migrate everything to the cloud—and from one cloud to another.”

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This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.