The challenge
A rack move is easy to describe and hard to do. Eight racks, live equipment, a shutdown window and two sites. Get the cabling wrong and the kit arrives in the right place but does not work.
The planning ran for months. Nothing could start until the stakeholders had signed off, and the shutdown had a fixed time. Until then, all we could do was prepare.
The first day on site was a day shift of labelling, then waiting for the shutdown. That waiting is part of the job. Teams who rush a shutdown tend to meet the consequences at re-rack.
Our approach
We started with site surveys. We looked at both ends: access, lifts, rack positions, power and the route between them. Then came a full cable trace and audit of the eight racks, so we knew what connected to what before anything was unplugged.
That audit fed the pre-cabling. We did the cabling at the destination site ahead of time, so on migration day the racks had somewhere ready to land. There were extensive Teams calls along the way, and sign-off by all the stakeholders before we touched anything live.
On migration day we split the work into teams. Two teams covered a day and night shift for the de-rack and re-rack, including the logistics between sites.
A further team handled the trace and retrieval of cables. Another team did the patching and support at the destination.
Splitting day and night is a practical choice. Racks are heavy and the job is long. A relief team means the people lifting at the end of the move are not the ones who started it.
Every rack was labelled before it moved, which is why the first day shift was spent on labels and then waiting for the shutdown.
The result
The move was prepared for months: surveyed sites, a traced and audited set of eight racks, a pre-cabled destination, stakeholder sign-off and four clearly defined teams on the day.
