The Client
The Bank of America Corporation (abbreviated as BofA) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, with central hubs in New York City, London, Hong Kong, Minneapolis, and Toronto.
Bank of America was formed through Nations Bank’s acquisition of Bank America in 1998. It is the second largest banking institution in the United States, after JPMorgan Chase. As a part of the Big Four, it services approximately 10.73% of all American bank deposits, in direct competition with Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase.
Its primary financial services revolve around commercial banking, wealth management, and investment banking.
The Brief
Ace IT Relocation & Bank Of America have been working together for close to three years, initially contracted for professional services onsite we supplied two engineers to assist with the auditing & re-racking services.
Having met the BOA onsite representative our head engineer was able to assist above and beyond and as a result we now regularly provide resources to assist with the facilitation of the recycling of all Bank of America’s UK IT infrastructure. The majority of these items are located at either Bank of America’s UK head office located in central London or their dedicated data centre located in Camberley.
The Relocation
Over the course of our 3-year long relationship we have now completed 18 projects for Bank of America. The most recent of these was at the Camberley facility and involved the de-commission of around 250 devices. These vary from first, second, third, fourth & fifth generation 1u server devices right the way up to 6u storage arrays and tape libraries.
Generally, projects commence early on weekends so as to cause the minimum amount of disruption to the day to day running of the Bank.
The project manager arrives ahead of the main Ace IT Relocation team to ensure all devices required for decommissioning on that day are all powered off and de-cabled.
He will then proceed to sticker the devices and pull them a few inches out on their rails leaving the rack doors open to make them easily identifiable for the Ace engineers.
Once onsite the main team will enter the data centre equipped with a list of the devices so they can double check serial numbers when removing the relevant devices.
The removed devices are then place on the floor so that the secondary team can follow them and collect them in relocation cages before transporting it to the loading bay.
Here they are packed on to pallets, wrapped and strapped ready for migration back to the warehouse for assesing and breakdown.
Once complete the shipment is transported back to the warehouse where the recycling team take control of the infrastructure.
As part of this process a full asset spreadsheet is created identifying the following: make, model, part numbers, asset, memory, processors, HDD/storage devices, raid configs, power supplies, PCIE modules & finally an overall grading for the equipment.
For all grade A items the components are left inside so they can be resold easier (all data bearing assets will be removed and wiped before being replaced in devices). Any items graded as B or C will be stripped of components and re-sold or recycled in the various channels.
Result
Ace successfully delivered on all four deliverable elements within the project. Not only were we able to complete the project on time but we were also able to offset all project costs through resale of the disposal equipment collected. Shortly after completion Monster got in contact again to organise another disposal project.
Feedback
Ace IT Relocation – Head Engineer – “Myself and the team love the ease of the Bank of America projects, working in the same couple of locations we know everything is always ready and waiting for.
Testimonial
Of the several onsite contacts the project manager Jim has everything ready and waiting by the time engineers arrive on site! Always a pleasure
