Moving servers and server rooms is one of the most mission critical parts of an office move. It is a huge responsibility for the IT department as a company can lose a lot of data or money if they experience significant downtime on their network or phones. Here are my top three tips to successfully moving your server room:

1. Order Your Phone Lines Months in Advance of Your Office Move

This is probably not new to you. Telco’s are famous for being slow moving. Not only does a regular order take several weeks to process, other issues can arise as well (e.g. technical problem, miscommunication). Waiting for telco’s is one of the common reasons companies have to delay an office move to their new location. You can get your order expedited but that will still take a couple of weeks and it will cost you. Start the process several months in advance of your office move to insure your phone lines are up and ready when your company is ready to move offices.

2. Pre-build Your Server Room before the Office Move Date

Consider pre-building a skeleton server room so that they can make a quick cut-over during your office move weekend. You’ll not only want to pre-build racking, but it can be helpful to have a firewall, ethernet switch, UPS, and wireless access points setup and ready to go in the new server room. Also, prepare plenty of patch cables and power strips on hand so that you have everything you need to reconnect the servers when they reach the new location.

3. Hire Helping Hands

The IT department will have a full schedule over the office move weekend so it can be helpful to hire a team to disconnect and reconnect your desktops. There are IT companies that specialize in this kind of things. They will place everything at the new location as it was previously arranged on each users’ desk and they will test each system to insure that it’s working so that your employees can settle in quickly on their first day in the new office. This takes a huge burden off the IT department and allows them to focus on higher-level issues.

The movement of the server room is one of the most important parts of an office move. Although it can be complicated, you are well on your way to a smooth transition from one location to the next by following the above tips.