The Challenge
Currie & Brown is one of the world’s leading physical assets management and consultancy companies, in partnership with CDW we undertook the migration to a new datacentre.
- Needed a fully managed migration, taking control of the process
- Short project engagement with aggressive migration timescales
- Working within a challenging, space-restricted environment
- Pre-cabling 160 existing cables to migrate 26 devices
- Patching 200 cables
The Solution
Planning and Project Management
Our migration methodology is designed to focus on minimising downtime, reducing risks and guaranteeing the efficient delivery of server migration projects. A key element of this process is ensuring that your project manager has prepared for the challenges and utilised the available resources in the most effective way.
Audit
A Technimove audit is part of our best practice approach to migrations, we audited this environment 2 weeks before the move. With the audit complete we were now able to confirm all devices within scope of the project and the connections needed to be replicated in the new environment.
The Pre-Cable
Pre-cabling is a key strategy for ensuring that we achieve our goal of minimising your downtime as a result of the project. This meant our engineers were pre-cabling the new location 1 week ahead of the migration. As part of this process, we installed the copper and fibre cables in line with the requirements outlined by CDW.
The Migration
On the day of the migration, Technimove engineers arrived onsite 30 minutes prior to the start of the migration to sign in and prepare packaging material.
Once onsite, the devices were handed over to Technimove to systematically Decommission, De-rack and wrap in anti-static bubble wrap for protection, before being placed into purpose built, foam lined, server flight cases.
Once the flight cases were secured in the pre-fuelled GPS tracked Mercedes sprinters, Technimove travelled directly to the destination site via the safest and shortest pre-planned route.
Once at Angel Street, the equipment was unpacked and installed in line with the destination rack plans. Once racked, devices were recommissioned in line with the patching schedules.
Technimove undertook final checks before handing the equipment back over the client for the testing to commence ahead of schedule.
The Result
Matt Clarke [Service delivery manager / Currie & Brown] said “ Thanks guys great job.”
In partnership with CDW, we ensured that the migration was delivered. From the very beginning, the procedure we had put in place through our project management processes ensured the safe migration of their servers.
As a result, we delivered above and beyond expectations by
- Unloading and packing all 26 servers within 2 hours
- All devices installed and connected within 6 hours
- Completing the project 2 hours ahead of schedule.
Jim Ryder [Data Centre Manager/ Northamptonshire County Council] said ‘ I am glad you guys were here to do this it would have taken me days if I had done this myself.’’