Approximately eleven months ago we shut down operations in the old building at work and moved to a new facility. The biggest part of the move (for the IT Office) was relocating all of our servers. We had to schedule a significant maintenance window, shut down all of the servers, unbolt them from the old racks, move them across the county and install them in the new server room.
The first part of the move was the smoothest. On the other side we had to battle power issues, cabling issues, uncooperative backbone switches, a dead phone system and lots of co-workers who needed help getting set up. The new server racks weren’t deep enough for our rail systems and used incompatible screws from the old racks. Throw all of that into a pot, add boiling water and you’ll get a very long weekend implementation.
So in this situation what would any self respecting IT guy do? They would stack the servers in the floor, run cables everywhere and get the websites and e-mail back online!
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Servers stacked beside the racks.
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It looks like our server room exploded!
Fast forward eleven months and three abortive attempts to clean up the server room. I finally scheduled another maintenance window that we could deliver on. We have reduced our hardware footprint somewhat with server virtualization and e-mail system consolidation in the intervening months. My friend David Wehrle stopped by on a Saturday to help me break everything down and bolt it into the racks. Fortunately the rail adapters and new screws all worked well from the start. Remembering to bring my electric screwdriver with freshly charged batteries wound up being a big advantage over the initial moving weekend. I didn’t care for the four post racks that startedwarping once w added servers, making successive servers harder to mount. If I could go back and do it all over I would have probably purchased racks that had more substantial support around the four posts. Ah well, live and learn. After several hours of work we finally had everything squared away!
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Now we can actually walk around behind the servers!
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Who knew there was this much storage space?
David Reid, our systems administrator, helped me clean up the mess after we finished mounting the servers. We were sweeping up construction debris that had been there from when we moved in! Without the help of the two Davids this project would not have been completed. I really appreciate their help. It’s nice to finally have everything unpacked from the move, even if it was almost a year later!
Filed under: Hardware Tagged: move, racks, room, server, stack Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
