Data transfer appliance method and system

1. A computer-implemented method useful for migrating hundreds of Terabyte to Petabyte of data to a cloud-computing environment with a data transfer appliance comprising:

providing a data transfer appliance, wherein the data transfer appliance comprises an operating system, one or more computing processing units (CPU's), a memory, and a data storage systems;

implementing data capture from a data storage system to the data transfer appliance, wherein the step of implementing data capture from a data storage system to the data transfer appliance further comprises:

exporting a Network File Share (NFS) mountpoint to the data transfer appliance;

mounting to the data transfer appliance as an NFS mountpoint; and

capturing the data with the data transfer appliance from the NFS mountpoint;

storing a dedupe form of the data in the data transfer appliance;

physically shipping the data transfer appliance to a specified cloud-computing platform access point;

receiving the data transfer appliance and connecting the data transfer appliance to a highspeed cloud network;

creating a staging bucket in a cloud-computing platform on a per customer basis;

copying the dedupe form of the data in the data transfer appliance from the data transfer appliance to a customer's staging bucket in the cloud-computing platform; and

implementing data rehydration on the dedupe form of the data.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the data storage system stores at least a Petabyte of data.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the step of implementing data capture from a data storage system to the data transfer appliance further comprises:

with a workstation, managing the download a capture utility on the workstation using a data-transfer appliance web portal, and

wherein the capture utility is used to capture the data available on the workstation.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3 , wherein the workstation comprises a Windows® and Linux®-based workstation.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the step of storing the dedupe form of the data in the data transfer appliance further comprising:

splitting the captured data into fixed size segments;

calculating the fingerprint, deduping based on fingerprint database;

compressing and encrypting the dedupe data chunk;

appending the fingerprint to the dedupe data chunk; and

storing the data chunk on the appliance.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 further comprising:

before shipping the data transfer appliance, running a data integrity check on the data stored in dedupe form.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 6 further comprising:

reading the dedupe chunk data;

decrypting the dedupe chunk data;

decompressing the dedupe chunk data;

calculating a fingerprint of the dedupe chunk data; and

comparing the dedupe chunk data with the fingerprint generated during data capture and stored at an end of dedupe data chunk.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein the step of implementing data rehydration on the dedupe form of the data further comprises:

decompressing the data;

decrypting the data;

undeduping the data to an original format of the data; and

storing the data in the specified cloud-computing platform.