Local migrations provide the benefits described previously, and remote migrations extend the functionality of Data Migrator to allow storage administrators to free up local storage resources by migrating data to storage attached to a remote NFSv3 server or a cloud target such as Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). Data may also be migrated to a remote server for a variety of other reasons, including archival, deduplication, or policy-based retention, compliance, and access control. As with files migrated locally, when a client tries to read a file migrated to a remote server, the file is retrieved and sent to the client, so there is no indication to the client that the file is not in their local file system.
Remote migrations are controlled by user defined policies, just like the policies created for local migrations. Only the paths to the secondary storage are different. Local migrations have paths to secondary storage that is attached to the same server/cluster that hosts the primary file system, while remote migrations have external paths (the secondary storage is attached to a remote server).