Historical Data Migrations From Old to New Platforms.
Data migrations can go awry for many reasons, however, most often these bad situation scenarios can be avoided with consultation with CCS Retail Systems Support and some careful planning.
Here are some recent examples.
- Data Migrations where corrupt data is present.
An IT person did an in-house test migration to a newer NCR Counterpoint software version. The company preferred to not purge history regularly. There were some known corrupt data records complicating the procedure. The company had some history that was over 10 years old. (A recommended policy is to try to keep 3 years of history at a maximum.)
The IT person planned to start the upgrade on a Friday night and complete it by the following Monday morning. This approximately 48+ hour time frame would be very aggressive when considering the scope and complexity of the conversion.
- Trying to using the current software on antiquated hardware and unsupported antiquated operating systems.
Attempting this sort of migration can be a recipe for disaster because damage to your data could occur from system architecture and software limitations.
For example, a business owner copied his current updated software installation onto an old server running an older, unsupported operating system. The performance of the software was then extremely inadequate for the task. Program completion times were decreased by as much as two orders of magnitude from current systems available.
- Some things that you can do to prevent the above-referenced scenarios are:
1. Verify that existing hardware, operating system, and software infrastructure meets or exceeds the minimum requirements for the new software. This should be considered mandatory
2. Get proper training on the new software in advance of doing either a test migration or a live migration.
3. Read all of the documentation related to the entire data migration process.
3. Plan to do a thorough test migration, This would include having end-users replicate normal processing work that represents a least several days’ worth of live data that was done in their old system.
4. Schedule CCS Retail Systems Support to do the entire data migration or provide your organization with assistance on the migration project.
– John