It happens more often than one may think, yet many people have never experienced the interesting, gut wrenching, terrifying act of moving the internet. Ok, that may be a little exaggerated... nobody ever moves the ENTIRE internet. However, companies do move their entire operations, infrastructure and connectivity to a new facility fairly often.

Companies of all shapes and sizes chose to move data centers, or co-location facilities for a slew of reasons; power constraints, cooling constraints, space issues, pricing, service and support issues, the list goes on. Silverback has moved as few as 2 devices for one customer looking for network redundancy, and as many as 2,000 for companies that had out grown their office and needed to move the development labs to their new building.

We are often asked for advice when it comes to a data center migration, for those that have been asking, here are a few.

1. Understand your environment. If you don't know what you are moving, you will break it when you move it. If you don't know what machines talk to what, why, and where they are, it is quite likely something is not going to work when the little blinky lights (LBL's) come back on.

2. Understand this is a bigger deal than it sounds. We have encountered companies that have no idea what is actually involved in the relocation of the very thing that keeps them employed. Data centers stopped being little more than rooms and buildings full of heat generation and power consumption a long time ago. They are now the lifeblood of a new generation of the world. Just think what would happen if all of a sudden the internet just stopped. There are migrations that could have that effect, even if temporarily.

3. Proper planning is key. Assign a dedicated project manager to oversee internal operations and to manage external moving parts. Preferably someone that has been involved or influenced by a past migration project. Hire a contractor if necessary. Many companies give migration projects to under qualified or over worked project managers that don't have the time or skill set to manage a project of this magnitude.

4. Keep the changes to a minimum. Adding complex changes to your environment will limit your ability to test true functionality as devices come back on-line. These changes may also pull resources into unnecessary configuration and testing that will increase your overall downtime, and if something doesn't work, it is harder to troubleshoot if there is no "known configuration" to validate against.

5. Complete work that can be done before the migration...before the migration. If your maintenance window is very tight, there is a lot of work that can be done before your maintenance window begins. If you can build your network out prior to a migration, do it. This will allow servers to come online as soon as they are installed. If you have extra rail kits for your servers, install them. That will limit the amount of time and manpower required on game day.

6. I know I said 5, but this one is too important to pass up. Make sure you use the right resources for the right tasks. You don't want your teeth cleaned by your proctologist...why would you want to have your critical systems moved by people who are unfamiliar with that hardware type? Network engineers, Systems Administrators, Support Personnel are all trained and generally quite good at their jobs...their jobs rarely include the de-installation, packaging, transport, un-packing, installation and cabling of data center equipment. Your internal resources know everything they need to about the INSIDE of their equipment. Let trained professionals worry about the outside.

We have been involved in several relocation projects where the "wrong" people were assigned to critical tasks. This mistake is quite common, and can be quite disastrous. For example, if the person that needs to test all of the network functionality just spent the preceding 12 hours installing servers; they are not well rested and focused on completing the most critical task they have been assigned. On the other end of the spectrum, using a moving company that does not specialize in moving data centers is likely not properly trained to handle critical data center equipment. I have personally seen a mover set a server on its end, and roll it down a folding table end over end to wrap it in bubble wrap. That server did not survive the migration.

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