The Challenge
After 49 years, the Metropolitan Police force had to relocate from one of London’s most iconic buildings before it was handed over to its new owner.
Technimove undertook migration activities in partnership with DELL where they were;
- Working in highly secured government building (SC cleared engineers)
- Relocating devices consisting vital security data
- Relocating fully populated dedicated SAN rack
- Post-cabling due to time constraints
The Solution
Planning and Project Management
Technimove have extensive experience migrating infrastructure containing both live and sensitive data for clients within all business sectors, be it private or public domains, including central and Local Government. Understanding the importance of maintaining business continuity and ensuring that downtime was kept to a minimum, Technimove assigned a project manager who was engaged in the initial planning ahead of the migration along with supporting specialist technology teams. This was in place to understand the requirement at an infrastructure, application and program delivery level which included risk assessments, method statements, mitigation, communication and change management planning, as well as the creation and completion of a comprehensive Migration Project Schedule.
Audit
A Technimove Audit is part of our best practice approach to migrations, we audited this environment 1 month before scheduled migration recording all devices and connections. With the audit complete we were now able to confirm all devices within the scope of the project and connections needed to be replicated in the new environment.
The Migration
On the day of each migration, Technimove engineers arrived onsite earlier prior to the start of the migration to sign in and to 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, security tagged and sealed flight cases. All dedicated SAS and Twinax cables were packed separately from the kit in most careful manner.
Dedicated rack was secured in custom made rack jacket. Once the flight cases and the rack were secured in the pre-fuelled GPS tracked Mercedes sprinters, Technimove traveled directly to the destination site via the safest and shortest pre-planned route.
Once at the delivery address, the equipment was unpacked and installed in line with the destination rack plans, before the rack was moved into position.
Post Cabling
Due to the specific client requirement pre-cabling was not feasible. The Technimove team performed a bespoke service by ‘post-cabling’ the already installed devices on the migration day. As part of this process, we recommissioned the copper and fibre cables in line with a specific set of requirements outlined by our partners at Zebra Enterprises, Woking.
Technimove undertook final checks before handing the equipment back over the client for the testing to commence ahead of schedule.
The Result
In partnership with DELL we ensured that the migration was delivered and achieved all of the goals forthe project. 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
- Taking full control over migration tasks
- Provide a flexible approach to resourcing and adapting to rescheduled migration dates
- Completing the Migration within 6 hours
