Migrate 7TB of Database for Colo Migration We are going to migrate our data center from one state to another in next 3 months. I wanted to know, what is the best possible way to migrate one of our biggest database (i.e. ~7TB in size) as quickly as possible. Here is the information on the server and database:


Existing Data-Center: Georgia
New Data-Center: New Jersey 
Server OS: Win 2008 R2 Datacenter
SQL Server: 2008 SP1 Enterprise Edition
Data Storage: XIO System (Which we are not going to get it at new data-center)
Database Size: ~7TB
How data gets into this database: via Transactional Replication from other 8 cluster servers.
How 8 cluster is getting data: via Merge Replication from all our 2000 store servers every 30mins.


We will have a network pipe between our existing and new data-center, but it is not going to be that big. It is also going to get consumed by all the VM's our infrastructure team is going to transfer on daily basis. 

We ran a Full Backup (i.e. Ideara SQLSafe with iSpeed settings) on this ~7TB of database, it took ~9 hours and size was ~630 GB. We checked with the vendor who is managing our colo migration and network pipe between two data-center and they said, it won't be possible to Copy over 640 GB file faster to new data-center and we would have to do Full + Differential + TLOG to get up to date. 

Our issue is, data we are getting from all our store systems every 30 mins (via Merge Replication to Home Office), it generates lot of data change. If we try to do Full + Differential + TLog, we will be having same sizing issue and lot of downtime to copy over Differential and also we would have to deal with the Log file getting full, which we have limited space on our existing database server (as we are not getting XIO Storage anymore).
We were thinking about SAN Replication, but, as our SAN is going to be different at the new data-center, that won't work for us. 

What approach you guys think we should take to migrate this ~7 TB of database from our existing data-center to new data-center with minimum downtime?

**Note:Please let me know if I miss anything from the information side.

Thank you,

HP
One could write a book on this topic, but one option would be an out-of-band initial replication of your database to the new site by flying a copy of the server hard drive(s) to New Jersey, followed by log shipping until you catch up, followed by setting up your "transnational" replication to target both old and new sites until you're ready to switch.