Moving a small data center

[Marty Cormack]

We will be moving our data center to the new Lourdes High School next summer.

 

The new network will be in place in the new building, but we do need to move a firewall appliance and about a dozen Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008 servers.  Most of the servers are low end IBM System x Tower servers, though we have a few rack mount servers as well.  Given the small number and relatively light weight, we were thinking that we would just move them ourselves using a minivan.  We figured we would be more diligent about the care than a typical moving company employee.

 

Obviously we will be doing bare metal backups just before the moves, and may be contracting with Marco for emergency replacement server contingencies.   We were wondering about insurance.

Has anyone done this in the past?  Do you have any good advice?  Thanks.

[Mike Plass]

Marty,

I used to work for a major lumber company based in Denver.  When this company was in the money (before the housing crisis), they were purchasing up smaller lumber companies.  

As the manager of IT for the Midwest, I would be in charge of arranging the movement of servers from the smaller purchased companies and move them to the data center located in Denver.  This would include any "specialty" application servers that could not be virtualized.

We would always hire a moving company to physically move the servers and they would be insured at $50,000.  The $50,000 mark is to cover hardware costs and recovery of data labor costs in case there was an accident.  Of course, the bare metal backup were done before leaving.  We actually did 2 bare metal backups, 1 to keep onsite and 1 was sent to Denver (not with the physical server).  The one left onsite was the "just in case" we can't get the server back online Monday morning after the weekend move.  Depending on the application, we did not have a physical server to recover that bare metal backup to, but in most cases, it could have been dumped to a higher end desktop, which we had plenty of.

For what it's worth, I thought it was overkill to do all this.  We never had any issues with accidents or having to recover to one of the higher end desktops.  

I worked with the Denver IT team to make this all work.  They insisted on the heavy insurance. They had procedures that needed to be followed, as the parent company (financial institution) of this lumber company made sure of it.

Hope this helps.

Mike