Datacentre relocation project

New racks at Centro

6 months of planning and exection is now complete, and our datacentre relocation project has come to a close. While all the valued helpers take a well-earned rest we thought we would provide an insight into just what happens during such a project.

Relocating even a small number of servers between datacentres is a task fraught with potential disaster. When such a project scales up to moving hundreds of servers and dozens of network switches and routers from a live production environment, with strict time frames for acceptable downtime and zero tolerance for hardware failure, the project becomes even more challenging.

The project was complicated by the fact that during the relocation exercise, equipment was consolidated from two entirely separate datacentres, each with very different procedures and goods handling facilities

Older equipment in both legacy facilities was de-racked, transported to Centro on anti-static re-inforced pallets then re-racked in to new cabinets in their new location, allowing complete redesign of all cabling infrastructure in advance. The newer servers, not needing cabling modifications, were relocated by mounting the entire rack enclosures with all servers in-place on to a custom designed shock pallet, then crating the rack up and securely transporting it to their new home in the Centro datacentre.

The equipment was fully insured thoughout the relocation project, and all hardware was escorted by a datacentre security guard during the move. Downtime was restricted to between midnight and 6AM at weekends only throughout the project in order to minimise the impact on clients. All projected timescales were met and in many cases significantly exceeded, providing absolutely minimal disruption to service.

The entire project just couldn't have run so smooth without the help of the great team at Gyron, who assisted with every part of the relocation. A big thanks goes to everyone involved.

A few pictures are included below to give you a better idea of the project.