Patent attributes
A cloud-native global file system used to provide primary file storage for enterprise data is augmented to provide “direct-to-cloud” (D2C) migration of an initial data set. In addition to providing a filer, the service provider configures a direct-to-cloud migration tool, typically as a downloadable virtual machine (VM), that is executed in association with the hardware of the enterprise filesystem whose data set is being migrated. The migration tool reads the existing filesystem, transforms the data into a format consistent with that done by a filer, and pushes the result (a single version) directly to an object store in the cloud. In a first pass (run), typically a large bulk of the data is moved and, depending on how the migration tool is configured, one or more additional passes may then be carried out. When migration is complete (or substantially complete), the filer then is activated to complete the migration (if need be) and take over the go-forward operations.