Upon completion of all virtual migrations, the project was now approaching its final stages.
Technimove’s objective, was to relocate the reduced footprint of GAIN Capital’s infrastructure of 90 devices, from Park House to Interxion Data Centre. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing government-imposed lockdown, the migration was postponed.
Once the lockdown measures were eased, Technimove and GAIN Capital could re-schedule the migration. Technimove’s Project Manager had scheduled the Migration to be completed across 4 days, Friday to Monday. Tuesday was added within the migration plan as a contingency measure. This was in order to follow the government’s guidelines whilst keeping all onsite personnel safe.
Technimove’s scope was to perform the following:
- Pre/post-checks and power off/on all HPE 3PAR equipment
- Shutdown/power on all server and storage equipment, as per shutdown scripts and power down/up sequence
- Provide a network resource onsite to assist GAIN Capital during network testing
- De-Cable, De-Rack, package equipment, transport, Re-Rack and Re-Cable all 90 devices in scope.
On the first day of the Migration, Technimove allocated two teams; a power down and migration team. The power down team was first to arrive onsite, they had an 8 hour window to gracefully shutdown all servers, storage and 3PAR devices.
The migration team arrived 1 hour prior to the completion of shutdown. Upon the migration team’s arrival, engineers began by preparing all packaging material required for the Migration. The migration team lead then liaised with the team lead in charge of the shutdown to ensure completion, ahead of commencing work. Once confirmed, the migration team commenced the decommission and labelling of all devices required to be migrated in line with the equipment list.
Equipment was de-racked before being individually wrapped in anti-static bubble wrap and placed into purpose built, foam lined, server flight cases.
All rail kits associated with the migration were labelled in line with the destination rack plans before being de-mounted and placed into purpose built, foam lined, rail kit flight cases.
Upon completion of the de-installation, Technimove’s team lead performed a walk round with the customer along with an equipment list, to perform final checks that all devices in scope have been removed.
Flight cases were secured and security sealed in Technimove’s Mercedes GPS Tracked, solid sided vehicles.
The pre-fuelled vehicles travelled directly to the destination site at Interxion, where the Technimove team unloaded flight cases and moved them into position within the new facility.
Technimove commenced breaking the security tags and seals. All rail kits were unpacked and installed as per the rack designs. After rail kits were installed and flight cases were brought into the DC room, the team reached a milestone and then ceased works. The team ensured all devices were secured within GAIN Capital’s DC environment, signed off and left site until the next day.