IO Blog
Moving equipment to a new colocation home isn’t as big a headache as many enterprises fear. Here’s a seven-step plan to ensure that your move will be as efficient and pain free as possible:
1. Assess your equipment needs. Unless you’re planning a clean install with brand new equipment, you’ll need to take a dispassionate look at your existing gear and decide which items are going to make the trip and which will be left behind. To get things moving quickly and efficiently, take along only what you really need. There will be time to add other stuff later.
2. Set a move-in date. Defining a specific move-in date (M Day) will motivate you and your team to work toward a defined goal. This is also a good time to decide how long the move will take. While many small businesses can get the job done in only a day or so, larger deployments can take significantly longer.
3. Get the services ball rolling. Work with the colocation provider well in advance of the move-in date to plan and arrange for set-up tasks and services such as cabling, cross connects and carrier connections.
4. Schedule the required downtime. Your organization’s employees, partners and customers need to be alerted well in advance to any anticipated service interruptions during the move. For some enterprises even a planned downtime period is unacceptable. If this is true for your business, you’ll need to find a way of keeping key systems online during the changeover. One way of doing this is using the move as justification to update your servers and related hardware. This way, some or all of the old hardware will continue performing vital tasks until the moment the new gear goes “live” at the colocation site.
5. Visit the colocation site ahead of time. Whether you’re moving your equipment into an entire suite or just a single cage, you still need to visit the site just before the move to make sure that everything is in place to support your systems and that all of your equipment will fit into their designated places.
6. Get your equipment ready. When M Day arrives, shut down your servers and label everything. Make sure that your equipment is well packed so nothing gets broken during the move. It’s also a good idea to run a security scan on your servers prior to moving in order to get a clean start at the colocation site.
7. Expect the unexpected. You know the old saying about the best-laid plans. Well, it happens to be true. Anticipate that bad things will happen during the move. The truck may not arrive on time, a relocated server may fail to boot, cable connectors may not fit and so on. Anticipate these problems and for any others you can think of by developing a series of “Plan B” solutions. By preparing for the worst, you’ll greatly improve the odds that you’ll be able to get everything up and running quickly and painlessly.
