How Fast is Fast?

One question our customers frequently ask is: how much time will my migration take to complete?

We were recently contacted by a customer with 400 GBs of email data to migrate to BPOS, but only a T1 line. With a T1 line, the maximum amount of data which can be transfered out is 1.544 Mb/sec, or 694 MB/hour. This also assumes full duplex and does not even account for protocol overhead. While we offer lightning-speed migration, transfering this quantity of data amounts to 30 days – regardless of migration technology (unless it involves sending a hard drive by mail). Fortunately, our customer was able to connect their email system to a faster network and complete their migration in less than 48 hours.

How fast is MigrationWiz? It really all depends on your connection speed. But as you can see from the stats below, it can go pretty fast. In this case, we migrated emails from an IMAP server with an export speed exceeding 3 GB/hour, to a BPOS Exchange server with an import speed exceeding 950 MB/hour. It wasn’t our fastest migration, but it is still quite fast. If you are left wondering what “active” and “passive” mean below, it does deserve some explanations. The active duration represents the time spent actively importing/exporting mailbox data, while the passive duration represents the time waiting for the import or export to catch up. In this case, the IMAP server was able to export data much faster than BPOS could import it, so the source passive duration was 37 minutes. Had BPOS been able to sustain a 3GB/hour per mailbox import rate, it would have been 0.