Case Study:

Move of Server Room Infrastructure for International Information Technology Corporation

Background:

An international information technology corporation wanted to consolidate over one hundred technical staff into a new building. The company had two existing offices, both with server rooms, housing thirty-five servers, and associated devices such as disk arrays, tape drives, monitors, consoles, and networking equipment. Most of the equipment was not housed in server racks.

Requirement:

Arrange the move of all necessary equipment over a weekend and ensure minimum business hours downtime. Consolidate the infrastructure into a racked environment to ensure minimum floor space wasted in new data centre. Ensure the new server room racks and accessories are in a position to accommodate future growth.

Solution:

The environment was documented in two spreadsheets, one containing all servers and their associated accessories, the other containing all network equipment and associated network links. All equipment in the server rooms was labelled with the server or device hostname, or the hostname of the server or device to which they were attached.

The amount of infrastructure that would need to be moved or provided in the new premises was reduced by making better use of existing resources. Network audits determined that more switch ports, and therefore switches, were provided than necessary. Audits of servers determined duplication of services and allowed for server consolidation and retirement.

A Visio plan was drawn up of the future racked environment with all devices that would be relocated. This plan was used to help put together a comprehensive parts list and subsequent order of six racks, Power Distribution Units (PDUs), Internet Protocol Keyboard Video Mouse (IPKVM) and accessories, rack monitor, and various server racking parts.

When the new equipment arrived work that was able to be carried out in advance of the move was completed. Fifteen consoles and monitors and a six port KVM, used by mixture of Windows and UNIX servers, were retired and replaced by a single keyboard, monitor and mouse with IPKVM that was capable of supporting one hundred and forty four servers. HP-UX servers were configured for use with IP network consoles which had not been previously utilised. All racks and accessories were set up in the new data centre.

Plans were completed detailing the order, timing, and instructions for server shutdowns and cutover of network links, including details of any staff that needed to be advised or contacted at the time. A plan also detailed priority of servers’ start-up order, and the testing of them once running, to confirm normal functioning.

A moving company was organised, and supervised, in bubble-wrapping, externally labelling, and moving all server room equipment to vacant floor space allocated to each rack’s equipment in the new data centre. A team of six technical staff from within the company were organised to assist during the move weekend.

Servers were shut down from 4pm on Friday afternoon. The movers started around the same time and had all equipment placed in the data centre by midnight. The technical team started work at 7am on Saturday and had all the servers racked and cabled into the six racks by 7pm. On Sunday morning testing was carried out and the move was officially complete by lunchtime.