Zilliz, the company behind the open-source vector database Milvus, has launched a comprehensive migration service designed to help organizations move unstructured data and vector embeddings between platforms without downtime or additional costs.

The new offering comes as enterprises increasingly rely on vector databases to power artificial intelligence applications, but face significant technical hurdles when trying to switch between different systems or vendors.

"Organizations working with unstructured data for AI applications face migration challenges that traditional ETL pipelines simply can't solve," said James Luan, VP of Engineering at Zilliz.

The company's solution aims to provide what he calls "the missing infrastructure layer" for AI data migrations.

The migration challenge has become more pressing as unstructured data - including images, text, audio, and video - now represents over 90% of enterprise data. When organizations convert this data into vector embeddings for AI applications, they often find themselves trapped by technical complexity and vendor dependencies.

Key obstacles include the variety of data formats, fragmented storage systems, and the specialized processing required to handle vector embeddings. Many companies have delayed infrastructure upgrades or AI initiatives due to these migration complexities.

Zilliz is addressing these challenges through two complementary services:

- The Zilliz Migration Service provides a fully managed, cloud-based solution that requires no configuration and promises zero downtime during transitions. The service maintains continuous synchronization between source and target systems throughout the migration process.

- For organizations with stricter security requirements, the Vector Transport Service (VTS) offers the same capabilities as open-source software that can be deployed in secure or air-gapped environments.

Both solutions support migrations from popular vector databases including Elasticsearch, Pinecone, Qdrant, and PostgreSQL, offering flexibility for organizations looking to switch platforms or consolidate multiple systems.

Several organizations have already implemented the migration services with notable results. A global retailer successfully migrated 200 million product embeddings from Elasticsearch to Zilliz Cloud, claimed to achieve a 40% improvement in search accuracy while reducing infrastructure costs by half.

A financial services provider used the service to eliminate vendor dependency by moving to an open-source foundation without interrupting operations, addressing growing concerns about vendor lock-in in the AI infrastructure space.

Both migration solutions are now generally available, with the managed service integrated into Zilliz Cloud and the open-source VTS available under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub.

https://zilliz.com/zilliz-migration-service