I previously, published an article about the Google Offline Transfer Appliance and my friends asked about more information about it and I thought to write an article about the Oracle Transfer Appliance for my followers. This article put together more information such as products updates and tweets, I’d like present all of these resources to my followers.
Before write about the appliance, let’s see what are the options available to transfer the on-premises data to Oracle cloud. It can be easy to upload data to the cloud directly, if your data set does not exceed couple of GBs, but when it comes to large scale data sets and limited speed and bandwidth of the internet connectivity, it might be challenging. That’s where these options are come in to play. So, it is better have a basic idea about the options available to move data to the Oracle cloud infrastructure from your on-premises datacenter.
What Options Are Available To Transfer Data To The Cloud?
Oracle Fast Connect
It is an elastic, easy and economical network connectivity alternative which leverage the public internet connectivity to connect your on-premises datacenter to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Services. This connection can be scaling up and down to 1 to 10 Gbps.
| Product | Pay as You Go (Port Hour) | Includes |
| FastConnect 1 Gbps | $0.2125 | No other chargers for inbound and outbound transfers |
| FastConnect 10 Gbps | $1.275 | No other chargers for inbound and outbound transfers |
Note: Network and Datacenter provider will charge for the services and those are not included
How about the data transfer rate ? How much time it takes?
Data Transfer Disks
You buy your own hard drives and ship to Oracle transfer office and Oracle ships drive back to you once the transfer completes. This option is more practical if you have small data set and if you need more than 30 days to copy data, may be due to an operation or any other reason.
Data Transfer Appliance
This is a high capacity storage appliance which can be loan from Oracle for about 30 days and copy your data and ship back to Oracle transfer office. This is a practical solution when there is a large amount of data such as 150 TB to be transferred to the cloud. At the time of writing this article this service is only available in us-phoenix-1, us-ashburn-1 and eu-frankfurt-1 regions. Data originating from EU region can only be transferred to eu-frankfurt-1 and then data can be uploaded to either Frankfurt or London.
Once you ordered the appliance you’ll get something like this
Data can only be imported to the to the object storage and Oracle expect to support the exporting capabilities at a later time.
What Are The Components Involved With The Transfer Appliance?
Basically, two components are involved with this operation
- Transfer Job: This is the logical representation of the Transfer appliance and Transfer Job associated with only a single appliance
- Transfer Appliance: This is the physical appliance you get once you place the order
How Does This Appliance Work?
First of all, Transfer Job must be created in the console and you have to request the Transfer Appliance. Oracle needs to approve the order and appliance will be shipped to the given address when you place the order.
Once you got the appliance, connect to the appliance using USB-DB9 serial cable to a Computer (host) which has a terminal emulator software such as Putty, ZOC or Minicom .
Specific Terminal emulator settings must be in place to work with the appliance:
- Baud rate: 115200
- Emulation: VT102
- Handshaking: Disabled or Off
- RTS/DTS: Disabled or Off
Power on the appliance, connect to the network, configure the networking and initialize the transfer appliance using Data Transfer Utility. Then authentication and data encryption should be configured. NFS mount points configuration needed in order to copy the data. For Dabian or Ubuntu, “nfs-common” package and for Oracle Linux or Redhat Linux “nfs-utils” package should be installed to access the NFS mount points.
Once the NFS mounts are in place data copying should be carried out using normal data copying tools. Finally, arrange the package, lock the appliance in the shipping case and ship back to Oracle transfer site, make sure to arrange the shipment with the given 30 days period and if there is an extention required Service Request must be raised.
I believe this article provide a basic idea about the Oracle Transfer appliance and other data transferring mechanisms to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Article Short Link: https://tcrum.net/Oracle-TransferAppliance
References:
- Tweets have been taken for the knowledge sharing purposes from @svilmune and @IaasGeek
- Oracle FastConnect
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FAQ
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Blog
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