Migration of Two Million Records with Zero Downtime for a Global Financial Organization

Challenges

Data Migration from one tool to the other always brings along certain challenges as mentioned below:

• The volume of data to be migrated from Microfocus ALM was in millions and migrating these within a 2-month time frame without automation was a mammoth task.
• Specific interrelationships were to be migrated – specific relationship link migration out of all the existing relation links was a challenging task.
• Being cross-vendor tools, one from Microfocus ALM and the other from Microsoft, data model and hierarchy are different, thus transforming data from one tool to another is a great challenge.
• Records from multiple Microfocus projects were to be migrated into Azure DevOps projects. Merging items from multiple Microfocus ALM projects to fewer structured Azure DevOps projects was another big challenge for this project.
• The organization was using several Active Directory users not having access to the Azure DevOps Organizations. Mapping and migrating those users was a challenging job.
• All Attachments and Comments associated with all Microfocus ALM artifacts including Design Steps and Call Tests needed to be migrated to Azure DevOps.
• Migration of the Last Test run was an immense challenge along with attachment. In ALM one can manipulate Test Run Steps while execution but in Azure DevOps, it does not allow you to manipulate Test Runs Steps and only allows mapped to Design Steps. Kovair migrated the orphan Test Run Steps as an HTML attachment for the Test Case.

Last but not the least, the management also wanted to get the full report from the tool to minimize the manual effort of migration sanity check after the entire migration was over. All these challenges added up to the complexity of the data migration.

Kovair Solution

Kovair, in the first step of the migration, started understanding the data structure and reaching a consensus on the migration use cases with the client. Kovair used its data migration and synchronization product – Kovair QuickSync for migrating the data.

QuickSync tool was installed in a server at the client’s organization. Before initiating the configuration of QuickSync, Kovair analysed the existing data structure of Microfocus ALM Projects and took confirmation from the client on the field and artefact mapping. After this, the configuration was done on a project-by-project basis. The entire configuration was achieved through simple mouse clicks without the need for any coding. As there were altogether 87+ projects to be migrated, the client preferred to go to the route of parallel migration. Every project went through the parallel phases of configuration from the field and artefact mapping, data migration and data validation post-migration from multiple hosts. Initially, the customer performed POC with two small projects in their staging environment and once they were satisfied with the outcome, migration of production data took place.

Kovair QuickSync also facilitates users to have real-time monitoring of the migration. The volume of successful and failed transactions could be monitored from one single Quick Sync window. In case of failed migration, detail level logs were maintained which provided the root cause for each of the individual failures. This detailed level of information helped to identify the root cause behind most of the failures. After the completion of a major part of migration, Kovair team performed a meticulous data sanity check both manually and using automation. It was determined that around 5% of the data did not migrate due to condition mismatch during migration. Kovair did validate the data at source and respected target and then re-migrated the residual items. Thus after the second pass, 100% of data was migrated with zero data loss. With Kovair QuickSync, organisations can be assured that no data loss will occure.

Fig: Data Hierarchy between Microfocus ALM and Azure DevOps

Kovair QuickSync Business Values

• Easy tool installation and quick initial setup.
• Codeless configuration for mapping the Microfocus ALM Projects, Entities and Fields to the Azure DevOps counterparts.
• Capability to migrate multiple projects including Requirements, Tests, Test Runs and Defects to Azure DevOps.
• Easy monitoring capabilities have an objective and subjective statistical view of the state of migration with reports and logs.
• Retry mechanism for any unsuccessful migration.
• Turnkey solution based upon the transaction volume of data across all configurations and projects for any number of users.
• Multi-hosting capability to run the migration in parallel from multiple servers to boost migration speed.
• 100% migration completion with zero error

With all these unique aspects and capabilities of integrating in-house tools, Kovair Omnibus provided a very elegant solution for their integration needs.

Conclusion

As the world is getting digitally connected, data migration has always been a cause of concern for organizations across all sectors. Not many dared to venture into data migration having understood the challenges it posed. However, Kovair QuickSync is a perfect solution for fast and secure data migration fit for any volume of migration records. Its numerous features and benefits make it an excellent choice to accomplish an error-free and turnkey secure data migration.

With more than 87+ projects to be migrated within a short period and that also with zero downtime, was a huge challenge for the organization. Kovair QuickSync successfully migrated the entire set of data within the given time without a single minute of downtime with migrations occurring around the clock.

Kovair QuickSync has guided many organizations to move their valuable data from one tool to another without the associated complexities. It is easy to install and manage to provide an array of immediate benefits. If you are still wondering how to migrate your data, do read the testimonials of our clients, and then move ahead with your migration projects with much higher confidence with Kovair.