The Hitachi NAS Universal Migrator allows data to be migrated from file systems on pre-existing, third-party NAS systems to HNAS systems. Clients can continue to access and use the data while the migration is in progress. This means that data stored on a third-party NAS system is immediately available for access, via an HNAS system. File systems from the third-party NAS system can be actively used, with HNAS as the frontend, while the data migration is in progress. The Universal Migrator provides fast migration of large amounts of data, while also allowing the use of the data, during migration, with minimal down time (compared to previous types of NAS migration).
It does this in two stages or phases. The first virtualization stage discovers data on the LNAS source and creates objects on the HNAS file system. The second migration stage copies the user data from the original file system so that at the end all data is wholly contained on the HNAS file system. At that point the original NAS can be disconnected.