Archive Migration with the Savento Migration Suite

Background

Every system has a limited service lifetime. This has to be considered for archiving systems as well as for the attached components. If the service lifetime is exceeded, a migration is necessary. This might be a media migration (e.g., optical media to a hard disk-based system) or a server migration (e.g., to a new version of the archiving system). Savento can assist in both cases with long-lasting experience.

Project Description

A well-known German pharmaceutical company uses an archiving system which is connected to their SAP® system. In the archiving system ADK files as well as documents are being archived. Archived data are stored on WORMs in a jukebox connected to the archiving system. Because of the maintenance overhead and outdated soft- and hardware components (which again cause high license and maintenance consts) it was decided to perform a migration to a new archiving system. Not only because of growing internal as well as external demand for performance of the archiving system, the PBS ContentLink (PCL) server in combination with a EMC Centera storage system has been chosen as a replacement of the old archiving system. Savento was mandated to perform the archive migration in a way that is compliant to GAMP (Good Automated Manufacturing Practice) and easy to reproduce.

Project Procedure

After a thorough as-is analysis of the archiving system and the SAP system, Savento identified the data to migrate and the data volume in cooperation with the client. Then, Savento created a migration concept and a project plan where the required migration steps are described. With the help of performance tests, Savento was able to give an estimation of the migration time for different document types. In particular tests it was checked if parallel jobs have a positive impact on the migration performance.

In the next phase, Savento installed its Migration Suite in the test system of the client and conducted comprehensive functional tests that were documented in a separate test report. The Migration Suite is based on standardized SAP ArchiveLink® function modules which have been enriched with further functionality with respect to increased safety, efficiency and user comfort. This alleviated the process and helped to avoid mistakes. All migration steps were logged in a separate status table. This enabled effective completeness checks and meets compliance requirements, for example in audits.

The actual migration was carried out by the client himself. During this time, Savento was available at any time to analyze errors and help with problems. Because of hardware-related constraints, it was not possible to run more that three jobs in parallel. During migration the load on the SAP system was neglectably low. The logging of the Migration Suite provided a seamless reproducability and allowed to continue migration jobs (even if preceding jobs were aborted) without copying data twice or causing any inconsistencies in the system

Results

All archived data (4 million documents, 700 print lists und 6000 ADK files) were migrated successfully to the new archiving system. Only very few documents were not readable in the source archive and had to be reread from a backup WORM. The project was finished after only two and a half months, even one month before the date originally planned, despite of system problems, holidays, and a parallel upgrade project to ECC 6.0.

After the migration to the new PBS PCL archive, it was possible to shut down the old archiving system, which led to significant cost savings. Moreover, the maintenance of the archiving system decreased a lot. The users are very pleased with the improved performance which they numbered with a factor of up to ten.

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