DataCenterMoving.com - Making You the Super Hero of Your Move!

Our Data Center Moving Blog helps you learn more about data center moving. The posts to this site can be found by category:

• Data Center Moving Checklist
• Data Center Relocation
• Data Center Site Selection
• Corporate Relocations

The Sitemap below shows all of the topics on this site. Subscribe to Blog updates via e-mail on the form on the right or follow us on Twitter at @datacentermove.

Jump Start Your Learning with These Popular Posts

I’ve selected some of our most popular topics to get you up to speed quickly:

• Where do you find the elusive data center move checklist?
• How do you calculate moving expenses for data center relocations?
• How do you write a data center relocation statement of work (SOW)?
• What do you need to know about data center site selection?
• What are the common factors that undermine almost every data center move?

Let us Earn your Business. Here’s how to Contact Us:

• E-Mail: urgent@e-oasis.com (Let us know your urgent need)
• Phone: 303-485-1115 (Leave us a voicemail anytime with your contact information)
• Follow @datacentermove on Twitter

We welcome all your questions about Data Center Moving. We’re ready when you are. Give us a call.

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Corporate Relocations, Data Center Checklist, Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection

Every data center move is unique and every move is important to us. We’ve updated our popular data center moving guide for 2009 doubling its size to over 20 pages.

E-Oasis Wants to Earn Your Business
While many white papers are written carefully to disclose very little information, ours are different. Make no mistake – we do want to earn your business  by planning your data center move. However, we think the best way to do that is to explain the anatomy of a data center move including common mistakes to avoid.

This 2009 edition of the data center move guide contains:

• Is Your Move Feasible?
• Anatomy of a Move
• Budgeting
• Site Selection
• Pre-Move Planning
• Teardown
• Transit
• Arrival
• Re-Assembly
• Post-Move
• Top Mistakes to Avoid

Get your guide by providing your e-mail address in the sidebar on your right.

Survive or Thrive?

Data center relocations are major projects. But just surviving the relocation may prove to be the wrong strategy. Our relocation planning will save you money, help you avoid costly and potentially embarassing mistakes, and minimize the disruption to your business.

Check our our blog-at-a-glance feature if you’re new to this site to learn more about data center moving.

We move data centers.

Put our systematic methodology for planning and moving a data center to work for you. We  make you the Super Hero of your move.

• Planning – Helping you avoid costly mistakes with our data center move playbook.
• Execution – Keeping the data center move on-track.
• Post-Move Support – Critically important post-move services ensures success.

Give us a call. We’re ready when you are.

Corporate Relocations, Data Center Checklist, Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection

That’s the funny thing. It’s not a secret. John Rath put together a great piece on why the Midwest could become a data center magnet. It’s a good read. Especially for economic development organizations struggling to differentiate their areas.

How many of these factors do you have? How well do you stack up against the Midwest?

1. Reliable and inexpensive power
2. Renewable energy sources
3. Supportive social and business environments
4. Natural disaster avoidance
5. Network connectivity options

Don’t forget about our four point action plan for Regional Economic Development Agencies:

1. Package Your Infrastructure – Power, Fiber, and Transportation needs to be readily available to the advance teams for evaluation.
2. Assess Your Available Inventory for Data Center Readiness – Your region can be quickly eliminated because you can’t provide an inventory of available properties that answer fundamental data center questions. Items such as existing data center raised floor height, generators, proximity to fiber paths, are but a few of the items a relocation team wants to know. Most commercial listing agents have no idea what type of data center space exists in their inventories.
3. Pre-form a Welcome Team – Advance evaluation teams get on airplanes to have a look. You can increase your odds with a multi-disciplinary Welcome Team to guide their evaluators and answer their questions. If you stuff this team with local politicos and Realtors, you’re missing an opportunity to put technical experts in front of the advance relocation evaluation teams.
4. Don’t Just Sit There – You can build all the FAQ pages, marketing collateral, and databases you want, but assuming a corporate relocation team is going to find you is a bad bet. Seek creative ways to let others know about your area including us. Send your information to dcmove@e-oasis.com. Also consider industry-specific conferences and trade shows to highlight your area.

Corporate Relocations, Data Center Site Selection

Most Data Center moves begin with the C-Level suite typically with a seemingly simple question: “How much is it going to cost us to move our data center?”

In the scramble to answer that question, a less-than-scientific process begins that often jeopardizes most data center moves before they begin.

• Data Center Move Planning is more important than getting a quick cost estimate. Before you send your staff off to search the Internet for the elusive data center move project plan, step back and do some planning yourself.
• Keeping the move confidential preserves many options including the ability to assemble advance teams to check out data center locations without jeopardizing your negotiating leverage.
• Expecting your Information Technology (IT) staff to know how to move a Data Center properly is unrealistic as most have never completed the task. Get educated with our Data Center Move Guide available in right-hand sidebar.
• Understand that your Data Center Relocation is unique and requires more than a generic data center move checklist you found on the web. Allow us to earn your business and make you the Superhero of your move.
• Be realistic about time-frames. Data Center Moves of size and complexity take 12 months or more to plan and execute properly. We can help you with a realistic time-line with the right services at the right time.

You reason that Google has rescued you before and you search harder to locate elements of your relocation plan. But when you come up short, then what?

• Where do you find the elusive data center move checklist?
• How do you calculate moving expenses for data center relocations?
• How do you write a data center relocation statement of work (SOW)?
• What do you need to know about data center site selection?
• What are the common factors that undermine almost every data center move?

It costs nothing to call us at 1-877-485-1115 to discuss your unique move. We’re ready when you are.

Corporate Relocations, Data Center Checklist, Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection

It’s well established that large data centers are seeking cheap power. That criteria can lead to locations where substation improvements are required to provide the redundant power paths that are a key criteria of a modern data center. From a very basic perspective, power should enter the site from different substations following route diversity. Each substation should be sized to handle the entire projected load.

Practically, however, the utility company or the customer may need to engage the services of Power Engineers who specialize in distribution systems and substation design to optimize for the location and to satisfy specific utility requirements.

The intersection of cheap power, available fiber capacity, and low real estate costs has been the recipe for data center site selection. John Rath makes an important observation that “Businesses large and small want their infrastructure in close proximity to their business offices” (read more from John’s data center site selection paper).

This means that data centers will continue to be opened in areas that require upgraded electrical infrastructure. This could range from simple increases in electrical service to full blown re-engineering of the utility feeds that service the desired site.

Modern data centers require the appropriate electrical infrastrucutre of capacity and route diversity to serve their desired purpose.

Data Center Checklist, Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection

Wyoming earmarked $1 billion in 2004 to improve power transmission capacity with four projects already underway as a result. Texas also understands the critical need to invest in the transmission grid and is proceeding with plans to put almost $5 billion to work to capitalize on power transmission originating from wind farms.

It’s not as sexy as building a mega-datacenter, but both States stand to benefit nicely in the long term by improving their power grids. It could also touch off a decades-long arms race to improve the capacity of power grids in key areas as these projects require planning and lead-time to complete.

Data center site selection criteria that seek to be located closer to the power generation source could be impacted as these projects approach completion.

Track the investment in the power grid infrastructure and you’ve got a five year window into the potential location of many power-hungry facilities — data centers included.

Wyoming and Texas enjoy high untapped wind energy potential and both realize the importance of getting that engergy on the power grid by investing in that infrastructure.

Data Center Site Selection

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is a rigorous approach to ensuring your business can continue to operate in the event of an unplanned outage. Despite all the attention to BCP, the lesson of Geographic Diversity continues to be a lesson learned but a lesson not remembered.

A transformer explosion at hosting company, The Planet in Houston,  on May 31, 2008 forced the company to take the entire facility offline until tests could be completed to allow the generators to supply power. This meant 9,000 servers were without power.

It simply is no longer sufficient to utilize a single location for your operations even if you have made that single location highly available.

If you can remember only one lesson in Geographic Diversity, remember to diversify your DNS at another location.

Attention to business resumption would lead you to conclude you need to do more than just provide for DNS diversity. Colorado is uniquely positioned to provide data centers that are geographically diverse from most locations in North America. While the debate continues about the required separation between data centers, consider there are 9,000 servers without power at a Houston data center. If some of them had geographic diversity even a few miles away, those businesses could have resumed their operations.

Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection

As reported by Rich Miller at DataCenterKnowlege, forward-thinking Regional Economic Development Agencies are focusing on attracting large data center projects. The debate continues on the real economic impact after accounting for tax incentives and infrastructure improvements given the relatively small amount of jobs these large footprint data centers create. What many economic development agencies may not realize is that there are many more data center-related jobs at stake than the mega-projects most often reported in the media.

We move data centers of all sizes. Most data center moves are a result of a larger corporate relocation project which means jobs of many types will follow the data center move…not just the jobs to keep the data center running. What can economic development agencies do to highlight their region’s strengths?

1. Package Your Infrastructure – Power, Fiber, and Transportation needs to be readily available to the advance teams for evaluation.
2. Assess Your Available Inventory for Data Center Readiness – Your region can be quickly eliminated because you can’t provide an inventory of available properties that answer fundamental data center questions. Items such as existing data center raised floor height, generators, proximity to fiber paths, are but a few of the items a relocation team wants to know. Most commercial listing agents have no idea what type of data center space exists in their inventories.
3. Pre-form a Welcome Team – Advance evaluation teams get on airplanes to have a look. You can increase your odds with a multi-disciplinary Welcome Team to guide their evaluators and answer their questions. If you stuff this team with local politicos and Realtors, you’re missing an opportunity to put technical experts in front of the advance relocation evaluation teams.
4. Don’t Just Sit There – You can build all the FAQ pages, marketing collateral, and databases you want, but assuming a corporate relocation team is going to find you is a bad bet. Seek creative ways to let others know about your area including us. Send your information to dcmove@e-oasis.com. Also consider industry-specific conferences and trade shows to highlight your area.

Contact us to inquire about how we can help you with your Regional Economic Development efforts related to data center moves. We have a number of innovative services that can help you understand and attract organizations who relocate their data centers.

Corporate Relocations, Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection

It’s no secret that the transmission grid is the weak link in power delivery to industrial and large commercial customers. Dual transmission feeds, expensive primary-side UPS systems and backup generators are common solutions for data centers. But large customers wanting power diversity to their location discover that footing the bill for transmission improvements is no bargain.

To learn more, I interviewed Damian Berger, Senior Electrical Engineer at Peak Power Engineering, Inc. who has researched wind energy and transmission issues in the West.

What gives Wyoming an edge with power transmission capacity in the West?

Wyoming is moving forward with plans to reinforce the transmission grid. In 2004, the Wyoming legislature established the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority (WIA), and, with $1 billion in bonding authority, commissioned the WIA to “participate in planning, financing, constructing, developing, acquiring,maintaining and operating electric transmission facilities and their supporting infrastructure.” The creation of the WIA was not an empty gesture. To date, four transmission expansion projects are underway with the support of the WIA.

Four? Give us a sense of the timelines required to get a transmission project off the ground to understand the magnitude of having four projects underway.

Transmission line projects can take two or more years to complete. The process begins with feasibility studies. Because the transmission grid is an interconnected system, the studies can be complicated, with multiple transmission owners being involved. Public interest and environmental concerns can significantly impact route selection. If conflicts arise, a project’s timeline can easily double.

Other states seem to be going in a different direction?

While policy makers are busy trying to provide incentive for utilities to upgrade the transmission system, Wyoming is doing what existing transmission owners are reluctant to do: take the necessary risks to increase delivery capacity. The payoff will be big. With the #1 ranked wind energy resources in the nation, interest in purchasing future transmission capacity already outweighs concrete plans to build infrastructure. Transmission owners in Wyoming are also moving forward with upgrade plans, but their process is necessarily slower.

Wind energy generation clearly benefits from this transmission capacity, are there other effects?

Not only do new transmission lines increase capacity, but they make the local grid more reliable and less vulnerable to outages. Some organizations are already taking notice of Wyoming’s potential. With $20 million in direct funding from Wyoming, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will build the world’s fastest supercomputer in Cheyenne, Wyoming. And the Wyoming legislature and governor are eager to attract more developers to the state with grant money earmarked specifically for data centers.

Any predictions on wind’s contribution to the greening of data centers?

Wind power is probably the first thing that comes to mind when talking about green power. Did you know, however, that the benefits of wind power are often offset by the long distance transmission from the wind farm to the consuming load center? Transmission and distribution system losses should not be overlooked in the green power equation. Having large loads in close proximity to abundant energy resources, including wind, is more cost effective and energy efficient than shipping power over large distances through the power grid.

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Data Center Site Selection

Writing a Statement of Work (SOW) for a Data Center Relocation can be a daunting task. Has your Google search for an example to jump start your efforts left you frustrated?

While there are entire books on the process of writing a good SOW, you likely don’t have the time to read them. Worse, they don’t include the kind of details you’d like for the data center move.

What are the Minimal SOW Elements?

You’ll need these minimum elements in every Statement of Work:

• Define the Scope
• Define the Deliverables
• Define the Timeline and Period of Performance
• Define the Evaluation Criteria
• Define the Reporting Requirements
• Add your Terms and Conditions

What Data Center Relocation Elements should you include?

You can appreciate that without knowing your specific details, it is impossible to capture the critical details that would make your move successful. Be sure and have your SOW peer reviewed before releasing it to your Vendors. Here are some questions to help you get specific for your project:

• What are the origin and destination locations?
• What total square footage is in each location?
• How much equipment needs to be moved?
• What downtime is acceptable?
• What work is being done by your staff and what work do you want the vendor to do?
• Do you have a master move timeline?
• Do you have special equipment that needs to be moved?
• Do you need specific technical expertise?
• Do you have enough time to run a competitive process, or do you need to fast track and get a Vendor on-board quickly?

Is the Perfect SOW the answer?

A Data Center Relocation can be a complex undertaking. A well written statement of work is but one step in this complex journey. Ultimately, the success of your move depends on a number of critical elements — not the least of which is allowing enough time to plan your move.

Learn more about Data Center Moves with our Free Data Center Relocation guide.

Corporate Relocations, Data Center Relocation, Data Center Site Selection