Three easy steps to moving your server room
** If you are moving soon, I recommend bookmarking this page so you can reference it when you need it.
As a move coordinator, I’ve been asked many times to guide an IT department through a seamless transition from one location to the next. This is a huge responsibility for the IT department as a company can lose a lot of money if they experience significant downtime on their network or phones. Here are my top three tips to successfully moving your server room:
1. Order your phone lines months in advance
This is probably not news to you, but the phone company is famous for delays and mixups. Not only does a regular order take several weeks to process, but it’s not uncommon for there to be a problem or miscommunication. Waiting for the phone company is the biggest reason companies have to delay a move to their new location. You can get your order expedited but that will still take a couple of weeks and it will cost you (even if the delay is their fault). I recommend starting this process several months in advance to insure your phone lines are up and ready when your company is ready to move.
2. Pre-build your server room
I always recommend to my customers to pre-build a skeleton server room so that they can make a quick cut-over during move weekend. You’ll not only want to pre-build racking, but it can be helpful to have a firewall, ethernet switch, UPS, and wireless access points setup and ready to go in the new server room. Also, you should have plenty of patch cables and power strips on hand so that you have everything you need to reconnect the servers when they reach the new location. We recommend using companies like B & B Electronics because they provide great advice and offer a huge selection on this type of equipment – and it definitely simplifies matters to work with a single vendor. Think of it as an opportunity to upgrade old technology!
3. Hire a few helping hands
The IT department will have a full schedule over move weekend so it can be helpful to hire a team to disconnect and reconnect your desktops. There are IT companies that specialize in this kind of thing. They will place everything at the new location as it was previously arranged on each users’ desk and they will test each system to insure that it’s working so that your employees can settle in quickly on their first day in the new office. This takes a huge burden off the IT department and allows them to focus on higher-level issues.
The movement of the server room is one of the most important parts of a move. Although it can be complicated, if you follow my top three tips, you are well on your way to a smooth transition from one location to the next.
