Data Centre Relocation Project Planning

Things to consider…

• Contract with a Specialist IT Relocation Company:  A specialist company like Ace IT Relocation will be able to guide you through all aspects of the relocation project and provide advice and points to consider throughout the entire process.
• Assign a Project Manager: Weather this is your own internal resource or someone who is appointed by a specialist contractor, this person should be responsible for regular meetings to confirm the progress of the plan and the accomplishment of tasks in a timely fashion.
• Critical Prerequisites: These should be considered as some of the most important aspects of the project and, if not considered early, can lead to delays during the relocation. These include failure to confirm resources, no pre-approved access for vendors to the collection and destination sites, and insufficient space in vehicles and flight cases to accommodate the hardware.
• Project Initiation: Project Initiation Document (PID) and other required project management documents.
• Discovery: Assemble background documentation (as appropriate and available) On-site equipment and audit of all devices.
• Design: Review existing asset and connection information and create new environment build, cabling, patching and rack plans. Design new network and storage cabling/racking infrastructure. Design new data centre cabling/racking infrastructure.
• Planning: Migration strategy. Technical infrastructure provisioning. Risk planning and management. Operational processes. Test and acceptance management.
• Execution: Management of the new environment infrastructure build. Management of transitional and retained systems integration/change. Delivery of pre-cabled and prepared environment, ready for migration of equipment. Delivery and management of the migration of all hardware, potentially over multiple phases. Quality, testing and acceptance management.
• Close: Preparation and handover of all asset and project information for operational teams. Formal close of all project tasks.

Your relocation spend will make sense; the higher capabilities of our infrastructure movers mitigate unforeseen challenges by following a planned checklist (project plan template) to make sure your server, storage and network infrastructure is installed correctly in their new home.

If you are a competitive big brand, you need to know that when you are spending a lot on ‘data centre relocation’ (often much more than mid-sized businesses spend), as an enterprise customer, it is important to get it right advice and follow best practices for server migration projects.

In addition to making sure you don’t have any, (or to minimise) downtime when moving to a new colocation facility, so you maintain up-time and cause minimal disruption to usual business activities and network connectivity.

Infrastructure Planner – Should include Hardware and connectivity audits, project time line schedule, project road map & escalation points.

Project Plan & Checklist – Including detailed project plan, individual resource responsibilities, risk assessment and method statements and project completion checklist.

Detailed Project Plan Tasks

• Contact information for all parties involved with the data centre relocation, including management escalation information.
• Review each step of the detailed project plan. Confirmation that each task is assigned to an individual and includes an expected time frame to complete each task.
• Confirm that backups of all infrastructure scheduled for migration have successfully been completed.
• Relevant parties start the shut down process for mission critical and priority infrastructure.
• All other infrastructure is shut down in accordance with project time line schedule and project plan.
• Visual confirmation that all equipment has been shut down and all devices have been labeled with destination rack and u-position information.
• De-Rack all equipment and pack into flight cases, all equipment should be packed so that the device at the top of each flight case will be installed into the bottom of the corresponding rack at the destination site.
• Load all equipment into vehicles with the priority equipment being loaded last so that it will be the first thing unloaded and installed at the destination environment.
• Confirmation that the destination environment has been pre-cabled and pre-labeled with all relevant cables hung at roughly the correct u-position ready for installation, and labeled in accordance with the preferred standard.
• Network administrators to check cabling, switch configuration and firewall connectivity.
• Power on all Network infrastructure and check connectivity, then power up storage arrays and other storage infrastructure.
• Power on all other infrastructure and test all equipment in the new environment for network and storage connectivity.